Iambic Pentameter with an Identity Crisis
You may be counting the syllables in some of the lines in "Remembrance" and wondering how in the world we can call this iambic pentameter. To begin with, we notice that the very first line of the poem starts with a trochee, not to mention the anapest we see in the middle and the amphibrach we see at the end. So how can this be iambic pentameter?
Shake It Up, Baby
Well stalwart Shmooper, we applaud your attention to syllabic patterns and can answer your question with two words: metrical deviation. Think of it this way: the base meter is like a hotdog while the metrical deviations (other feet) are like the different toppings you can get. At the end of the day, you're still eating a hotdog but sometimes you may opt for relish over onions. The same goes for Brontë's use of iambic pentameter. Sure, it's supposed to follow that daDUM pattern with five stressed syllables in total for each line, but it just doesn't always get in line. So line 3 is like a plain hotdog, boring we know, while line 1 is like a hotdog with the works.
The purpose of throwing in so many variants at certain points seems to be to accent the speaker's emotions, which tend to linger over her lover's grave in line 1. The speaker puts to work those long syllables ("Cold") and those unstressed anapests ("and the deep"). Hear how those words sound as if they take a while to really get out there?
At other times, especially when the speaker is feeling stronger and ready to move forward, we hear perfect moments of iambic pentameter, like line 29: And even yet I dare not let it languish.
Despite all of the variants, "Remembrance" still reads like a typical elegy with the initial lament, followed by the speaker's admiration of her lover, and then the consolation. So although the poem may sound all over the map in terms of syllables, the organization is still by-the-book.
Rhyming "Remembrance"
What really keeps everything together, no matter the number of variants we have, is the speaker's use of an alternating rhyme scheme: ABAB (with different rhymes for each stanza). Even if we're distracted by the occasional anapest, we still have some perfect rhymes that highlight some key relationships between words and ideas.
For example, the sixth stanza rhymes "destroy" with "joy" in order to accent the idea that things that are potentially destroyed don't always need fixing with the "aid of joy." Likewise the third stanza rhymes "spring" with "suffering" to highlight the contrast between the seasons and the speaker's remembrance, which has gone on unchanged and sorrowful.