How would you compare the tragic implications of "Rooms" by Charlotte Mew and "Monna Innominata [I dream of you, to wake]" by Christina Rossetti?

Christina Rossetti was an English poet of the Victorian era. Charlotte Mew was also English, but writes at the transition from Victorian Romanticism to Modernism.

Mew’s poem “Rooms” begins with the poignant “I remember rooms that have had their part / In the steady slowing down of the heart,” pointing to themes of remembrance and loss. In line six, the reader is hit with the element that ties the rooms together, “Rooms where for good or for ill—things died.” Then Mew drifts from a literal meaning of death to the figurative emotional death of the speaker and her lover. The two "lie dead" even though they seem to wake and sleep. This hints that the pair may be suffering from an emotional death or the death of their emotional connection to each other.

Rossetti’s “Monna Innominata,” meaning unknown lady in Italian, creates a voice for the unnamed woman glorified in the poetry of such writers as Dante and Petrarch. The speaker grieves the loss of her lover and treasures her dreams in which she can be with him again. The final lines give the seemingly logical reasoning, “If thus to sleep is sweeter than to wake, / To die were surely sweeter than to live.” The speaker thus contemplates preferring death to the pain of grief.

These poems both explore themes of love and loss but with different tragic implications. Rossetti’s poem is a more traditional take on lost love and grief, while Mew’s poem is a more subtle exploration of the figurative death of a relationship or emotional connection.