I Remember, I Remember – Summary & Analysis

In Short

• A nostalgic poem about the poet's cherished childhood memories.
• Contrasts the joy and innocence of youth with the sadness of adult life.
• Uses vivid imagery of nature—flowers, trees, and swinging—to recall happy moments.
• The speaker wishes he could return to childhood or had died before growing up.
• Shows how time changes us and takes away youthful freedom and happiness.

Line by line analysis

Lines 1–4

I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;

The poem opens with the powerful repetition of "I remember," which at once shows that the speaker is fixed on his memories. This anaphora (repetition at the beginning) stresses how strong and alive his memories are. The speaker recalls his birthplace—a clear, concrete memory that grounds the poem in a real house. The "little window" is a small but intimate detail which makes the memory feel homely and personal. The sun "came peeping in at morn" is personification; the sun acts like a friendly visitor. The soft morning light stands for the hope and brightness of childhood.

Lines 5–8

He never came a wink too soon,
Nor brought too long a day,
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away!

Here, the sun is called "He," as if it were a person who can choose when to appear. The speaker claims the sun was always perfect in timing—never too early, never making the day feel long. This ideal balance shows how he now glorifies his childhood. The phrase "But now" marks a sudden change in tone from gentle joy to deep sadness. The speaker says he often wishes that night had taken his life away, meaning he wishes he had died in that happy time instead of living on into an unhappy present. Night here stands for death, showing the depth of his despair as an adult.

Lines 9–12

I remember, I remember,
The roses, red and white,
The violets, and the lily-cups,
Those flowers made of light!

At the start of the second stanza, the repeated "I remember" returns, pushing the poem further into past scenes. The speaker now recalls the garden filled with red and white roses, violets, and lily-cups. The bright colors and variety of flowers create rich visual imagery. When he calls them "flowers made of light," he uses metaphor to show how magical and glowing they appeared to him as a child. This suggests that childhood vision turns ordinary things into wonders.

Lines 13–16

The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday,—
The tree is living yet!

The poem moves from flowers to trees and birds. The lilacs where a robin built a nest add life and movement to the scene. Mentioning "my brother" planting a laburnum tree on his birthday brings in family and personal feeling. The line "The tree is living yet!" with an exclamation mark shows the speaker’s excited surprise that something from his childhood still survives. This surviving tree is a living link to the past, though it also reminds him that he himself has changed while the tree has not.

Lines 17–20

I remember, I remember,
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing;

In this stanza, the memory shifts from still objects to active play. The speaker recalls the place where he used to swing. Swinging suggests motion, freedom, and delight. He imagines that the fresh air rushing past him must feel the same as the air rushing past swallows in flight. This comparison is a metaphor that shows how he felt almost like a bird, light and free in his childhood.

Lines 21–24

My spirit flew in feathers then,
That is so heavy now,
And summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow!

These lines form the emotional centre of the poem. "My spirit flew in feathers then" is a metaphor comparing his mood and energy to a bird with feathers, soaring lightly. In contrast, his spirit is "so heavy now," showing that adulthood has weighed him down with care and sadness. The image of "summer pools" that could "hardly cool / The fever on my brow" suggests that as a child he was full of restless energy and excitement that even cool water could not calm. Now, that energy has turned into burden and weariness in his adult life.

Lines 25–28

I remember, I remember,
The fir trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:

In the final stanza, he remembers the tall, dark fir trees rising towards the sky. As a child, he believed their thin tops actually touched the sky, which reveals his rich imagination and sense of wonder. This shows a typical childlike way of seeing the world—where everything feels nearer to heaven and full of mystery.

Lines 29–32

It was a childish ignorance,
But now 'tis little joy
To know I'm farther off from Heav'n
Than when I was a boy.

Here, the speaker admits that his old belief was "childish ignorance," but he does not mock it. Instead, he is sad that he has lost this simple, trusting view of the world. He says it brings him "little joy" to know that he is "farther off from heav'n" now than in his boyhood. This could mean he feels morally, spiritually, and emotionally farther from purity and peace. The poem ends on a deeply sad note, linking joy closely with being a boy and suggesting that such joy cannot be regained in adult life.

"I Remember, I Remember" – Word Notes

Line 1-8

• I remember – Repeated phrase emphasizing strong nostalgic memories
• peeping – Looking secretly or playfully (personification of sun)
• Morn: Morning (poetic/archaic)
• a wink too soon – A very short moment (idiomatic expression)
• borne my breath away – Taken my life/death (euphemism for dying)

Line 9-16

• vi'lets – Violets (old spelling showing poem's age)
• lily-cups – Lilies (cup-shaped flowers)
• made of light – Metaphor for glowing, magical appearance
• laburnum – Golden flowering tree common in English gardens

Line 17-24

• used to swing – Habitually swung (past habit)
• on the wing – In flight (idiom for birds flying)
• flew in feathers – Metaphor for feeling light and free like a bird
• fever on my brow – Intense excitement/heat (not illness)
• Brow: Forehead (poetic for face/head)

Line 25-32

• fir trees – Tall evergreen trees (symbol of height/aspiration)
• childish ignorance – Innocent lack of knowledge (not stupidity)
• 'tis – It is (old contraction)
• Heav'n: Heaven (poetic contraction)
• farther off from heav'n – Spiritually/morally distant from God/paradise

Phrase Meanings

• "Came peeping in": Looked playfully through window
• "Never came a wink too soon": Always perfectly timed
• "Borne my breath away": Taken my life (died)
• "Made of light": Glowing, magical appearance
• "Flew in feathers": Felt light/free like bird
• "Childish ignorance": Innocent lack of adult knowledge
• "Farther off from heav'n": More distant from innocence/God

Publication

Thomas Hood wrote "I Remember, I Remember" in 1844, near the end of his life; he died in 1845. The poem first appeared in print around 1844 in periodical or collected form and later became part of his collected works. It was included in The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood, edited by William Michael Rossetti, in 1903, which helped secure its place among his most famous poems. In 1904, the poem was reprinted in the American collection Poems That Every Child Should Know, bringing it to a wide readership of young people and families. Since then, it has appeared in many school anthologies, including ICSE literature books such as Treasure Chest: A Collection of ICSE Short Stories and Poems for Class 9, and is now studied as a key example of a nostalgic lyric that blends Romantic and early Victorian moods.

Contex

The poem belongs to the Victorian period but is strongly influenced by Romantic ideas about childhood, nature, and emotion. Thomas Hood lived a difficult life, suffering from chronic illness and financial troubles, which often left him weak and worried. These personal struggles shaped the sad tone of the poem. While he is also known for humorous and satirical verse, Hood wrote a number of serious, emotional poems, including "The Song of the Shirt," which attacked the harsh conditions of poor workers. "I Remember, I Remember" is less social and more personal, focusing on the inner pain of losing childhood innocence. It reflects the Romantic belief that childhood is a pure and sacred time, closer to nature and to heaven. Written in 1844, when Hood’s health was failing, the poem’s thoughts about death and the wish to have died young gain extra weight from his real situation.

Setting

The setting is the speaker’s childhood home and its surrounding garden and countryside, most likely in England. The poem does not name a town or region, but the details—roses, violets, lily-cups, lilacs, laburnum, fir trees, and robins—fit a typical English garden and landscape. The house has a small bedroom window where the morning sun shines in. Outside, there is a garden full of flowers and trees, a place for a swing, and pools of water that cool the summer heat. The setting is seen entirely through memory; readers never see the present physical place, only the remembered one. This remembered setting is peaceful, bright, and idealized, like a personal paradise. It contrasts with the speaker’s present life, which feels dark and heavy. The unchanged laburnum tree shows that the physical world may remain, while the emotional world of childhood has vanished.

Title

The title "I Remember, I Remember" is simple but very effective. It repeats the key phrase that begins every stanza, making memory the main focus of the poem. The repetition in the title already suggests insistence and emotional weight, as if the speaker cannot stop thinking about his past. The use of "I" makes it clear that this poem is intensely personal, not a general statement about childhood. The double "I remember" also creates a rhythmic, chant-like sound, which fits the poem’s musical and lyrical quality. The title promises a sequence of memories rather than a story with events and plot. It prepares readers to hear a chain of pictures from the poet’s early life. Because the same words recur in the first line of each stanza, the title also acts as a refrain that ties the poem together and keeps pulling attention back to the act of recalling.

Form and language

"I Remember, I Remember" is a lyric poem made up of four stanzas, each with eight lines (octaves). The poem uses a regular rhyme scheme of ABCBDEFE in each stanza, which gives it structure and musicality. The form is neat and balanced, matching the ordered and idealized memories of childhood. The lyric form allows the poet to express personal feelings directly, without a plot or dialogue. The short, even lines support an easy, song-like flow.

The language is plain and accessible. Hood uses simple, everyday words like "house," "window," "flowers," "swing," and "trees," which suit the child’s world being described. This simplicity makes the poem suitable for young readers and helps older readers connect with their own childhood memories. The tone is conversational, as if the speaker is talking to a friend while looking back on life. At the same time, the poem uses rich figurative language: personification (the sun "peeping"), metaphors ("spirit flew in feathers," "flowers made of light"), and vivid imagery. Hood also shifts between past and present. The memories are told in the past ("I used to swing"), while his current feelings appear in the present ("That is so heavy now"), underlining the contrast between then and now.

Meter and rhyme

The poem mainly uses iambic meter, where an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed one (da-DUM), giving the lines a natural, speech-like rhythm. Many lines are close to iambic tetrameter (four beats) or trimeter (three beats), though Hood allows some variation, which keeps the rhythm from feeling mechanical. This flowing rhythm suits a reflective lyric and matches the gentle movement of memory in the speaker’s mind.

The rhyme scheme in each stanza is ABCBDEFE. That means:

• Line 2 rhymes with line 4.
• Line 6 rhymes with line 8.

Examples of rhyme pairs include "born/morn," "day/away," "set/yet," and "sky/boy" in sound pattern. These end rhymes help to tie each stanza together and give closure at the end of each quatrain pair. The regular rhyme pattern creates a musical effect that reinforces the poem’s nostalgic, almost song-like character. Interestingly, even when the mood turns darker—as in the wish for death and the sense of being "farther off from heav'n"—the rhyme and rhythm stay smooth and ordered. This contrast between a sweet-sounding form and a painful message deepens the emotional effect, making the sadness feel quiet but strong rather than loud or dramatic.

Themes

1. Nostalgia for childhood

Nostalgia—deep longing for the past—is the central feeling in the poem. The repeated phrase "I remember, I remember" shows that the speaker cannot stop revisiting his childhood in his mind. Each stanza brings back a different picture: the house, the flowers, the swing, the fir trees. The memories are warm and detailed, filled with light, color, and movement. Yet this remembering is bittersweet because he knows he can never return to that time. The more he remembers, the more he feels the gap between past and present. Hood portrays nostalgia as comforting but also painful, because it highlights what has been lost forever.

2. Loss of innocence

The poem shows how growing up leads to the loss of childhood innocence. As a boy, the speaker believed that the fir tree tops were "close against the sky," a clear example of childlike imagination. He also saw flowers as "made of light" and felt that even the sun was his friendly companion. As an adult, he recognizes that these beliefs were "childish ignorance," yet he is not happy to be wiser. Instead, he feels that knowledge and experience have pushed him farther from heaven. Hood suggests that innocence, though naive, allowed real happiness and wonder, which cannot be fully regained once lost.

3. Passage of time and mortality

The poem reflects on how time changes people and leads them closer to death. Childhood is placed firmly in the past, reached only through memory. The speaker’s wish that "the night / Had borne my breath away" shows he sometimes feels it would have been better to die young, during that happy period, than to live into his sorrowful present. Time has taken away his lightness of spirit and replaced it with heaviness and weariness. The contrast between the living laburnum tree and the aging speaker highlights how the natural world continues while human life moves steadily toward its end.

Symbols

1. The sun

The sun in the first stanza stands for warmth, hope, and the gentle care that seemed to surround the child. It "came peeping in at morn," as if it were a friendly visitor checking on the boy. The speaker says it never arrived too early or stayed too long, which suggests that the days of childhood felt perfectly balanced and satisfying. The sun’s light represents the clarity and joy of that time. In the present, though, this comforting light has faded. When he looks back, the sun becomes a symbol of a lost world where everything felt right and life was full of natural brightness.

2. Night and darkness

Night and darkness symbolize death and inner gloom. When the speaker says he often wishes "the night / Had borne my breath away," he is expressing a quiet death wish. He imagines night as a force that could have carried away his life while he was still a child, sparing him the sadness of adulthood. Darkness here is not just physical night-time but an image of the unknown and of final rest. It contrasts strongly with the bright, friendly sunlight of childhood. This symbol shows how heavily his present pain weighs on him: he sees death as kinder than continued life in sorrow.

3. Flowers and garden

The flowers and the garden stand for innocence, beauty, and the richness of childhood experience. The roses, violets, and lily-cups are described as "flowers made of light," turning them into almost magical objects. The garden is like an Eden—a perfect, enclosed world where everything is bright, living, and full of color. At the same time, flowers are delicate and short-lived, so they also hint at the briefness of childhood. The laburnum tree planted by his brother on his birthday is a symbol of family love and shared memory. Its survival into the present shows that some parts of the past remain, even when the feelings that once surrounded them are gone.

Literary devices

1. Anaphora

Definition: Anaphora is the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines or clauses.

Example: "I remember, I remember" at the start of each stanza.

Explanation: This repeated phrase is the backbone of the poem. It stresses how the speaker’s mind keeps returning to his childhood. The chant-like repetition creates a musical pattern and makes the poem easy to recall. It also emphasizes that the poem is driven by memory rather than by events happening in the present. The insistent rhythm of "I remember" mirrors the way some memories stay fixed in the mind and come back again and again, especially when one’s present life feels unhappy.

2. Personification

Definition: Personification gives human actions or feelings to non-human things.

Examples: "The sun / Came peeping in at morn"; "He never came a wink too soon."

Explanation: The sun is described as if it were a gentle person who visits the child each morning, peeping in through the window and choosing the perfect time to appear. This makes nature feel friendly and caring in the child’s world. By calling the sun "He," Hood turns it into a companion rather than a distant object. This reflects the child’s sense that the world around him is warm and personal. In the adult present, this sense of living companionship with nature is gone, which makes the memories of personified nature even more poignant.

3. Metaphor

Definition: A metaphor is a direct comparison between two unlike things, without using "like" or "as."

Examples: "My spirit flew in feathers then"; "Those flowers made of light."

Explanation: In "My spirit flew in feathers," the speaker’s inner life is compared to a bird flying lightly through the air. This conveys freedom, joy, and energy more powerfully than a plain statement could. When his spirit becomes "so heavy now," the metaphor shifts to suggest a burdened, weighed-down soul. The phrase "flowers made of light" compares flowers to light itself, suggesting they seemed to glow with purity and beauty to the child. These metaphors help readers feel the emotional distance between the bright, feather-light past and the heavy, joyless present.

4. Imagery

Definition: Imagery is descriptive language that appeals to the senses.

Examples: "The roses, red and white, / The vi'lets, and the lily-cups"; "summer pools could hardly cool / The fever on my brow."

Explanation: Hood uses rich visual imagery to make the reader see the garden and its flowers, and tactile imagery to make the reader feel heat and coolness. Instead of talking about "many flowers," he names specific ones, which makes the scene vivid. The image of summer pools failing to cool his brow shows how intense his childhood energy was. These sensory details bring the memories to life and help readers step into the boy’s world. The sharpness of the imagery also highlights how clear these memories remain in the speaker’s mind, even though the time itself is long past.

5. Enjambment

Definition: Enjambment occurs when a sentence runs over from one line to the next without a pause at the end of the line.

Example: "And thought the air must rush as fresh / To swallows on the wing."

Explanation: Here the thought continues smoothly across the line break, reflecting the ongoing movement of the swing and the flight of the swallows. Enjambment creates a flowing, continuous feeling, as if the speaker’s memories pour out naturally. It also slows the reader down slightly, encouraging close attention to the images. This flowing lineation suits a poem that is about the movement between past and present, and about the smooth way memories can unfold in the mind without clear breaks.

6. Alliteration

Definition: Alliteration is the repetition of the same initial consonant sound in nearby words.

Examples: "I remember, I remember"; "roses, red"; "flew in feathers."

Explanation: The repeated "r" sound in "remember" and "roses, red" and the "f" sound in "flew in feathers" add to the poem’s musical quality. Alliteration links the words together in sound, making key phrases more striking and easier to remember. It also gives certain images extra emphasis—for example, "flew in feathers" strongly suggests the softness and lightness of the boy’s spirit. This device supports the lyrical nature of the poem and enhances its emotional impact when read aloud.

7. Assonance

Definition: Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in nearby words.

Examples: Patterns of repeated vowel sounds in lines like "Came peeping in at morn" and "summer pools could hardly cool" contribute to melody.

Explanation: The repeated vowel sounds knit the words together smoothly and add a gentle musical effect beneath the more obvious rhymes and alliteration. Assonance helps create a soft, flowing sound that fits the reflective, nostalgic mood. Because the poem often deals with gentle, tender memories rather than harsh events, the sound pattern supports this mood by avoiding sharp or jarring noises. The reader may not notice the assonance consciously, but it shapes the listening experience and makes the poem more pleasant to recite.

8. Symbolism

Definition: Symbolism is the use of concrete objects or images to represent abstract ideas.

Examples: Sun (joy, hope), night (death, sorrow), flowers (innocence, beauty), swing (freedom), fir trees (spiritual closeness or distance).

Explanation: Hood uses a network of symbols to deepen the poem’s meaning beyond literal memory. The sun and flowers stand for the brightness and purity of childhood, while night stands for the death the speaker sometimes wishes for. The swing represents carefree joy, and the fir trees suggest spiritual nearness to heaven in youth and distance from it in age. These symbols allow the poem to speak quietly but strongly about big ideas—innocence, loss, faith, and despair—without long explanations. Readers understand the emotional message through the images themselves.