1. In the lyric poem ‘Echo’ Rossetti employs a wide array of imagery to evoke the loneliness and desperation of the speaker as they call to a lost love, whether spiritual or human, to return.
The poem opens with anaphora to emphasise the desperate yearning of the speaker who calls ‘Come to me…Come’.
The hard consonance of the foregrounded imperative conveys the urgency of the speaker who longs for her lover to return in the ‘silence of the night’ or the ‘speaking silence of a dream’.
The oxymoron implies that the separation between the two seems so final that any reunification can only be possible in the realm of the supernatural and creates a sense of sympathy for the grieving speaker.
However, the speaker explains how dreaming of her lover wold be ‘sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet’.
The internal repetition evokes the sound of an echo rebounding in the emptiness of her life and the oxymoron implies the nature of the torn emotions she feels when thinking of him.
The speaker misses her loved one to the extent that she wishes she had awoken ‘in Paradise…where thirsting, longing eyes/Watch the slow door’.
Unusually for Rossetti, this metaphor creates an image of heaven as a place of misery and loneliness, with its inhabitants glimpsing their past loves through the ‘slow door’ that only opens one way and thus ‘let’s out no more.’
The asyndetic adjectives here present the dead as lost and alone, separated from earthly love and feeling.
The sense of loneliness extends into the final lines of the poem where she pleads with her lover to ‘come back to [her]’ so that ‘pulse for pulse, breath for breath’ she may give him her love once more.
The trochaic structure puts stress upon the plosives, contrasting with the gentle whispering sibilants littered throughout the rest of the poem and reflects her growing determination to be with him once more, even though throughout the poem she receives no reply to her many calls, only echoes and repetitions of her own voice.
Overall, particularly through aural imagery, Rossetti strives to evoke and the reader is invited to experience the desolate loneliness and yearning the speaker feels as she misses her loved one, be they human or spiritual.