A little church with steeple red, A zigzag fence, a tree; And in the corner, cross-stitched fine, The words: “Remember me.”
O, little great-great Aunt Katrine, Whose dust returned to dust When only nine years old, we keep Inviolate the trust,
And wonder as we gaze upon The church, the fence, the tree, If some faint presage stirred you when You stitched: “Remember me.”
Picture an old piece of needlework hanging on a wall: a small red-steepled church, a zigzag fence, a single tree, and in the corner the words "Remember me." The speaker looks at it and thinks of the girl who made it, a distant relative, Aunt Katrine, who died at only nine. The sampler is all that's left of her, and the family has kept it safe, treating her request as a promise they're bound to honor.
What gives the poem its tug is the final question. The speaker wonders whether the child sensed, even faintly, that her life would be short when she stitched those two words. The poem never answers, and that uncertainty is what lingers. The mood is quiet and tender, tinged with sadness but not dramatic. Nothing is overstated. The plain, repeated description of church, fence and tree makes the closing words land harder, as if the stitching itself were speaking across the years.