Poetry Journal 2: Personal Response “Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins

Collins in “Forgetfulness” depicts the melancholy realization that human beings turn to nothingness when memories began to slip away. The speaker is an old person that has forgotten memories from his childhood and laments the knowledge that he is not able to retain. He relates his loss of memory and knowledge. Through the sequencing structure, the poem emphasizes that knowledge and memories take too much space in the brain that we are unable to retain everything similar to the many experiences there are in life but we can only try few because we have so little time to live in this planet, after all we are fragile and die. The slow rhythm of the sequencing of metaphors reveals the poem’s tone of desolation, which is one of the feelings that we experience when we lose the essence of what makes our existence purposeful, knowledge and memories.
Collins refers to memories as floating “away down a dark mythological river” to show that memories not just vanished but they vanished because we start to replace them with new memories that might be more important to us. This metaphor further explains that we are the current that drive memories into nothingness. In the third stanza, the author explains that we see “the quadratic equation pack its bags,” because since we began to prioritize some memories over others we push them away which is sad because later in life when we try to recall things like this we appreciate its value.
Often times when we learn in school we are taught that we have to memorize certain formulas to solve a problem. But when we go on summer vacation we replace that memorization with something that has more value to us since we don’t think that will use what we learn later on in our lives. But the truth is that those skills that we should have learn we should still remember. I have learned that learning is cumulative one skill builds on another. For solving a physics problem, I have to remember the basic algebra that I took freshman year. If one cannot recall the memories, one start to feel desperate as described in the poem because you feel like navigating through a black hole not knowing what direction to take in order to get out. Thus, without memories we are nothing since they are the foundation of ourselves.