Forgetfulness Billy Collins Analysis

Memories from the past are shown throughout our environment. Sometimes, recalling memories from surroundings are simple, like looking into the eyes of your father. As people proceed in their lives, they encounter moments that affect them deeply. Sometimes, a discharge of memories occur, showing a recognition of righteousness in people. In a short story called “Aero Bars” by Robert Hilles, the narrator acknowledges his father’s love through recalling the past. By reminiscing memories of remarkable values or behaviours, one is able to develop a moral conscience.

The memories in the poem maintain a cohesiveness and continuity of experience through repeated motifs such as the violets and the ‘whistling’. Memories also give us a recovered sense of life, as shown through the final line of the poem ‘faint scent of violets drifts in air’. This example of sensory imagery also creates a rhythmic drifting sense linked closely to the “stone-curlews call from Kedron Brook”. It echoes images of the speaker’s mind drifting into reflection and aurally creates transience between the present and the past.

“If the human race didn’t remember anything it would be perfectly happy" (44). Thus runs one of the early musings of Jack Burden, the protagonist of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Throughout the story, however, as Jack gradually opens his eyes to the realities of his own nature and his world, he realizes that the human race cannot forget the past and survive. Man must not only remember, but also embrace the past, because it teaches him the truth about himself and enables him to face the future.

Memory is a powerful concept. Often when an individual undergoes a traumatic situation, the ramifications of these actions seep into an individualfs psyche unknowingly. In effect this passes through memory and becomes sub-consciously buried within a personfs behavioural patterns generally. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink explores the concept of a young mans subconscious desire for a woman whom he gcanft remember to forgeth (1Memento) as she is so deeply inlaid within his soul.

Memories are important, they are a personal record of our past experiences, and could be called the history book for our life. In the poem "The Heroes You Had as a Girl", author Bronwen Wallace tells the story of a woman who meets her high school hero later in her life, reflects on her memories of him, and ultimately decides not to talk to him. The effect that this topic has on everyone is the knowledge that we can be captivated and let our memories control us, and by knowing that our memories hold that much power, it may make it more mentally efficient to make accurate, and personal decisions in a fraction of the time. The topic and overall meaning that this idea holds convey a message that resonates with the idea that memories are in fact the central hub of our decision making. People remembering memories can affect their perspective on their lives to such an extent, that they prefer to immerse their mind in their past memories rather than the current reality.

Three poems written by Harwood that emphasise the idea of memory’s importance and its ability to alter and determine perceptions are ‘Father and Child’, ‘The Violets’ and ‘At Mornington’. Each of these poems reminisces on pivotal experiences that modify one’s assessment

Forgetfulness can be seen in many different lights; it can be seen a bad thing, or a good thing. In the poem “Forgetfulness” by Hart Crane, the speaker utilizes similes and metaphors to convey ideas about forgetfulness in order to develop the theme; in the poem by Billy Collins with the same name, the speaker utilizes personification and irony to convey ideas about forgetfulness to develop the theme.

You know those memories that never seem to go away like the ones that you look back on for the laughs, midnight memories, or the stories that you will tell your children. Unfortunately, not all memories are that happy. In the poem, "A Litany", Gregory Orr is recalling the day that he accidentally shot his brother when they were both children. The poem portrays a time of great sadness that Orr wants to share with the world as a way to cope and to speak to others who have had significant death experiences. In his poem, Gregory Orr utilizes poetic elements to show that one event can change one’s life for forever.

Memory is a set of cognitive processes that allow us to remember past information (retrospective memory) and future obligations (prospective memory) so we can navigate our lives. The strength of our memory can be influenced by the connections we make through different cognitive faculties as well as by the amount of time we spend devoting to learning specific material across different points in time. New memories are created every time we remember specific event, which results in retrospective memories changing over time. Memory recall can be affected retrospectively such as seeing increased recall in the presence of contextual cues or false recall of information following leading questions. Memory also includes the process

F. Scott Fitzgerald understands that memory is a double-edged sword, and he illustrates this thought in two of his short stories, Babylon Revisited and Winter Dreams. In his story Babylon Revisited, the protagonist, Charles Wales, is tormented by memories of his past. His wife is dead, and his old friends won’t stop interfering in his life. His sister-in-law is basing her current ideas of him on the fact that he was an irresponsible person in the past, and it hurts his life greatly. Winter Dreams takes a slightly different approach. In this tale, the memories of the protagonist, Dexter Green, start off as pleasant but are later warped by new information. With these two works, Fitzgerald describes the problems that memories can cause in

“Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory,” Dr. Seuss. Thought and emotions are items that will always last forever inside of humans through thick and thin. Not all the tangible objects given to people will forever withstand their life but the thoughts will always be there for eternity. Many people believe that they would be able to remember anything from an event and the different features of the situation but, people don’t realize the fact that the more they think about a situation the more the memory will change. The excerpt from The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and the excerpt, “Hope, Despair and Memory,” from Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Prize lecture both portray the value of memory through the contradictory

In the article “Why Did This Man Lost His Memory, Words, and Even His Ability to Walk?”, written by Lisa Sanders, an older man’s debilitating condition leaves doctors perplexed. The man’s syndrome started as a minor inconvenience, as he forgot a few words and names. Unfortunately, the gentleman’s health deteriorated rapidly and within a half a year, he forgot how to walk and eat. As a result, his average but satisfying life was gone. He was fired from his auto-repair job, his wife abandoned him, he was forbidden to drive, and extroverted personality turned reclusive. He was taken to his general health doctor, who referred him to a neurologist. Stumped, the neurologist sent the (adj person) to Dr. Joel Geerling, a neurologist who specialized

Memory – what it is, how it works, and how it might be manipulated – has long been a subject of curious fascination. Remembering, the mind-boggling ability in which the human brain can conjure up very specific, very lucid, long-gone episodes from any given point on the timeline of our lives, is an astounding feat. Yet, along with our brain’s ability of remembrance comes also the concept of forgetting: interruptions of memory or “an inability of consciousness to make present to itself what it wants” (Honold, 1994, p. 2). There is a very close relationship between remembering and forgetting; in fact, the two come hand-in-hand. A close reading of Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering”, and Susan Griffin’s piece, “Our Secret”, directs us

The paper’s centre of interest is on the narrative of ageing and how memory, metaphor and meaning are interconnected and inter-related to its discourse.

In everyone’s life there is a moment that is so dreadful and horrific that it is best to try to push it further and further back into your mind. When traumatized by death for example it is very natural to shut off the memory in order to self-defense suppresses the awful emotional experience. Very often it is thoughtful that this neglecting and abandoning is the best way to forget. In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, memory is depicted as a dangerous and deliberating faculty of human consciousness. In this novel Sethe endures the oppression of self imposed prison of memory by revising the past and death of her daughter Beloved, her mother and Baby Suggs. In Louise Erdrich’s