The poem Forgetfulness by Billy Collins is described about the nature of forgetting things. The writer of the poem is defined as someone who is suffering from forgetfulness. I get the feeling that the person who is writing this is intended to be someone older, someone who has lived through many experiences. The speaker is addressing everyone who will one day get one get old and realize that they too will start to forget things. I believe that the written himself is warning the audience about memory loss later in life and relates to memory loss as a whole and how it tends to affect himself and others. The title Forgetfulness is what the subject or poem itself is dictating. None of the words in his poem lack meaning. Every word was chosen carefully in order for himself to …show more content…
Each sentence builds an idea of the last one allowing one another to intertwine with each other. There is a use of figurative language through Forgetfulness. Along with the use of cliché.. “long ago you kissed the names of nice Muses goodbye.” Another example of figurative language used in this poem is the use of hyperbole. The hyperbole can be found when Collin states, “Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue, not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It had floated away down a dark mythological river...” Personification can also be found throughout the poem, “and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag...” this is an indication that quadric equation is a part of your memory that has yet been forgotten. Collin tends to write about the dark mythological river known as “River L”. Not knowing what the river itself stood for I tended to do some research and found that Collins is referring the River Lethe. This river is one of the fives rivers in Hades and it is also known as the river of forgetfulness. I thought this was an interesting part of the poem that some people would not end up
The Greek myth is how about how the seasons change and the poem is Demeter talking to Hades. Demeter is talking to Hades about her daughter Persephone and how he kidnapped her and cause the
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.
First and foremost, authors E.B. White and Billy Collins both use exceptional repetition to portray the themes of their writings “Once More to the Lake” and “Forgetfulness”. In the essay “Once More to the Lake,” the main character expressed his connection to the lake from a young age. Later in life he brings his son and begins to be at a loss for his identity while being at the lake. Similar in theme, the poem “Forgetfulness” is a tale describing the loss of parts of one’s life that used to be known, much like identity loss. Repetition is a major key in both texts for pushing the theme of identity loss. During “Once More to the Lake,” E.B White experienced many moments that
The geography of rivers is important to their symbolism in this story. Antonio’s river starts from a lake, a place of no morals; studies prove that infants are selfish beyond belief, and so is water at its birth. His river carries the water to the ocean, the place where all water lands, carrying the blood and salt and debris that it picks up on its long journey. All high rivers go to the ocean, no matter how many lakes they go through. The ocean is where water goes to die, until its spirit, in clean water, is carried through the clouds back into the frigid mountain lakes, where it is born again. This is the cycle of water, and the cycle of life.
Although this is a short poem, there are so many different meanings that can come from the piece. With different literary poetic devices such as similes, imagery, and symbolism different people take away different things from the poem. One of my classmates saw it as an extended metaphor after searching for a deeper connection with the author. After some research on the author, we came to learn that the
The last few lines in the poem are sentience that have been chopped up into different lines, to help
Memory is presented as either a way of life or a community of change, as demonstrated in ‘Aspens’, ‘Old Man’, ‘Aldestrop’. He does this through the variety of techniques such as change in form, use of imagery and alternations in the tone of each poem to explore memory. As well as this, Thomas explicates the devastation of emptiness due to the consequence of war, which is portrayed through the use of soft consonantal sounds or the use
In the poem “Alzheimer’s”, Kelly Cherry has written about her father. It begins with an old man trying to make sense of the things around him. He is obviously confused, but tries to hide it. She writes that he carries with him, “A book he sometimes pretends to read” (Line 5). The man seems to identify with the struggle of the flowers as they fight for space on the brick wall, just as he is struggling with reconciling this house with the one he remembers (Lines 6-7) (15). Alzheimer’s
Over all, the poem helps imagine a possible student siting in a desk, reading a poem, and pulling his/ her hair out. Also the poem’s sound seems to be rushed. Together with the tone, it makes the poem sound like an angry student speaking very fast as to why he/she hates poetry. The rhythm seems to be regular. It shows to have a regular beat of unstress and distress. Each line follows a beat, but the lines don’t rhyme. The poem seems to show a few figures of speech. “Has difficulty retaining such things as addition and subtraction facts, or multiplication tables” meaning has a hard time understanding the poem more than math (Collins). “May recognize a word one day and not the next” means the reader would have a hard time remembering the overall meaning od a poem and its means (Collins). Also it would mean that the reader was very annoyed that he/she forgot everything about the
He starts out his essay by basically asking us why bother remembering things when we have
The poem begins with using “melodies” as an image. In the first phrase, “Like melodies draw it to me softly through the mind,” the word “melodies” seems to be symbolic of thoughts or memories. These melodies are like a tune that you cannot get out of your head, a memory that he is unable to forget.
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.
The word "remember" in line two may be considered a play on words; re-member, or dismemberment as in the case of an abortion. "Damp small pulps" in line three sounds animalistic, as if Brooks is saying "pups" instead of "pulps." If the word "pulp" was in fact intended, it is then part of the poem's imagery, indicating something that is crushed,
In the short story, “The Rememberer”, by Annie Bender, the devolution of a man into simpler forms is put into place. The literary theory, Disability theory, can be examined throughout the story’s theme; the theme being the concept of the “rememberer” a person who has the position to “to hang onto and recall the memories…slowly being lost…” The connection between the story and the theory involves the character, Ben, devolving into less of a man, not being able to do things on his own and relying on his lover as a caretaker and a person to remember him after he is gone.
Memory is something all humans struggle with. A person’s memory is everything. It shapes the entirety of a person’s being. The fear of losing your memory is a uniquely human phenomenon, and to some degree I believe it must haunt every person. In these two poems, both titled “Forgetfulness”, two poets explore the idea of losing yourself and being human. Although their voices are very different, and the techniques which they employ to get their message across, the topic of the poems is the same. The truth is that forgetfulness is a many-headed beast, and it’s entirely valid that two different viewpoints could explore different aspects of it. Hart Crane’s poem focuses on the image of forgetfulness, the effect it has on humanity as a whole, and