Billy Collins' "Forgetfulness" weaves a series of poetic allusions and references, from Sir Philip Sidney and Greek mythology to Philip Larkin and Collins' own work.
Forgetfulness is one of Billy Collins’ more teasing poems. Like many of his lyrics, the conversational style and lack of rhyme disguise the artifice of the poem, and it seems like a reasonably interesting idea worked up with some clever imagery – worth reading to hear an intelligent musing aloud, but not particularly memorable. It is only on repeated readings that Collins’ poems show their complexities, and the images come into focus. Ironically (given the title of Forgetfulness), they tend to work on the memory, unfolding slowly rather than exploding on the page like a Ginsberg or a Berryman.
Forgetfulness certainly deploys its images with far more precision than is immediately apparent. After describing various items of knowledge leaving the mind – the names of the Muses, the quadratic equation – stanzas five and six fail to name whatever is being forgotten, a “whatever” which
has floated down a mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall
well on your way to oblivion
The river he refers to is Lethe, one of the three rivers of the underworld in Greek mythology. Anyone who drank from Lethe’s waters lost their memory – hence the irony of “an L as far as you can recall” With Collins’ typical word-play, “L” is literally as far as the addressee of the poem can recall, having forgotten the rest of the name, and the implied image is quite poignant: someone standing by Lethe, forgetting even the name of the river they have just drunk from. This underscores the poem’s implied preoccupation with memory loss as a symptom of increasing age: the “oblivion” mentioned is not jut absent-mindedness, but one of the rivers of the dead.
The last stanza plays with a similar reference:
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Though this is only implicit, I would suggest that rising in the middle of the night is often associated with increasing age, as is the preoccupation with the past which here associates battles with books and dates. The love poem is Sir Philip Sidney’s famous Sonnet XXXI from Astrophil and Stella, which begins “With what sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies!” and goes on to ask if the “wan face” of the moon means that there are unhappy lovers in the heavens as well as on earth.
This doesn’t seem to immediately bear on the idea of memory, until it is linked with another poem: Philip Larkin’s 1968 Sad Steps, which draws on Sidney, and begins “Groping back to bed after a piss/ I part thick curtains” to see the moon. Larkin’s poem ends by saying that the
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for other undiminished somewhere.
Collins’ image of the moon in the window sets up these echoes between poems down the centuries, as well as one with his own Man in the Moon, which figures the satellite as “a pale bachelor, well-groomed and full of melancholy”. The light suggestions and hints set the reader’s own memory working, until they are in a similar state to the persona in the poem: groping for the answer to these references, abandoning things in favour of words, reaching far back into the past, and marvelling at fragile the links of memory are, both within ourselves and our culture.
