Point of View

“Forgetfulness” is told in the second-person point of view using the pronoun “You”. However, this isn’t apparent until the end of the fourth stanza: “the entire novel […] which suddenly becomes one you have never read” (Lines 3-4). The second and third stanzas solidify this perspective, moving the pronoun from a general “oneself” to an individual — the reader. This creates a sense of both intimacy and vulnerability; the speaker shows the reader their fears and proposes that these fears can affect anyone. This encourages the reader to look at these themes from a different perspective. Ironically, it also creates distance between the speaker and the poem; one interpretation is that the speaker is talking to themselves, positioning their mental decline as an external adversary.

Language and Meaning

Like the majority of Billy Collins’s work, “Forgetfulness” uses conversational, everyday language with a humorous tone. The...