The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet with an unusual rhyme scheme in the sestet—the final six lines. These lines follow a CDDECE rhyme scheme, the purpose of which is to create a four-line separation between the two C-rhyme lines. This separation imitates the experience of forgetting someone and then remembering them again after a period of time. This link between form and theme is underscored by the language of the first C-rhyme line: “Yet if you should forget me for a while.” Appropriately, the reader is then forced to forget that line for a unusually long spell.
