Thursday was National Poetry Day, with this year’s theme being memory – or at least I think it was. I seem to remember we’ve already covered memory on Poster poems, but before that slips entirely from our minds perhaps we should consider the other side of the coin.
Forgetfulness can be sweet or bitter, sought after and welcomed or unwanted and fought against, depending on your circumstances. One way or the other, forgetting tends to be a process rather than an event, gradual and not sudden. We’ve all had the experience of picking up a favourite book that we haven’t read for years and being unable to remember anything beyond the vague outlines of plot and character and a couple of vivid phrases. This everyday phenomenon serves as starting point for Billy Collins’s poem Forgetfulness, an exploration of that slow descent into memory loss we call life.
If forgetting is a natural product of the ageing process, so is the fear of being forgotten when life ends. In a sense we still live on for as long as we are remembered by the living and suffer a second death when, as Thomas Hardy puts it in his dialogue poem The To-be-forgotten, we join “those / Whose story no one knows”. Austin Dobson, Hardy’s almost exact contemporary, handles the same theme in a more meditative mode in The Forgotten Grave. The irony of those “to Mem’ry dear” surviving in some sense on an almost totally illegible gravestone marking an unkempt grave carries an echo of Ozymandias; the ordinary citizen is as prone to obliteration as is the king.
Anne Stevenson expands on this idea in Forgotten of the Foot, a lament for the lost world of English mine-workers and their families. Stevenson mourns the systematic obliteration of all traces of this once-essential way of life, the forgetting of the very existence of a great civilian army that made industrial Britain possible, “As if they were never meant to be part of memory”. It’s a powerful and moving poem on a forgetting that was not sought.
By contrast, Emily Dickinson is concerned with willed forgetfulness in Heart, We Will Forget Him!. Like Hardy, Dickinson casts her poem as a conversation, but here it’s internal, as head and heart plot to forget what may be a lost love. If Dickinson is elusive when it comes to the object of her would-be amnesia, Sara Teasdale is entirely opaque in Let It Be Forgotten, where the identity of “it” is very much left to the reader to decide, while the poet concentrates her efforts on the clean-etched language and imagery that make the poem, ironically, unforgettable.
This irony – the fact that making a poem about forgetting requires an act of memory by the poet, and will if the poem is successful imprint itself on the memory of the reader – is central to WB Yeats’s Michael Robartes Remembers Forgotten Beauty. As with Shelley, the fulcrum of Yeats’s poem is the act of writing – a way of ensuring that the forgotten object of the poem is remembered.
In this spirit of remembrance, it seems appropriate to conclude this Poster poems with a poem by Dannie Abse, who died this week. Like his father before him, Abse was a doctor and he often drew on his experiences tending to others in his poetry. His poem In the Theatre, however, is a retelling of one of his father’s stories. It is a salutary reminder that, try as we may, some things just cannot be forgotten.
And so this month I invite you to share not your memories but your forgettings, if you can recall them. Perhaps you have rediscovered some forgotten memory, public or private, that you want to capture in verse, or maybe there is something you wish to forget. Whatever it may be, please share your poems here.
