As Marie Howe Said best, “Memory is a poet, not a historian.” Poetry about memory and nostalgia comes in many forms, from longing lyrics on past lovers, to odes on familiar places, to dirges honoring those who came before us.
Memory is one of the trickiest things about being human, as we can only sometimes control what we remember and what we forget. As such, it has long been a favorite topic and theme of poetry, as each line attempts to glean some insight into what it means to remember something and what it means to lose one’s memories.
The following poems offer a unique perspective on memory as they look back at the past from various perspectives, recalling sensations, events, people, places, and things that the speaker feels connected to, creating a web of time that lasts far beyond the poet.
‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ by William Wordsworth is a well-loved poem that describes a speaker’s return to a specific spot along the banks of the River Wye and his understanding of nature.
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
‘I wish I could remember that first day’ by Christina Rossetti is also known as ‘First Day.’ It focuses on the speaker’s regret that she can’t remember more about her first love.
I wish I could remember that first day,
First hour, first moment of your meeting me,
If bright or dim the season, it might be
Summer or winter for aught I can say;
‘In drear-nighted December’ by John Keats describes the way memories of happier and warmer times impact one’s emotions in the coldest hours of December.
In drear nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity—
Jean Bleakney’s ‘Consolidation’ is a deeply personal poem about the act of rearranging the cowry shells that the speaker and her children gathered in the past.
Some sunny, empty afternoon
I’ll pool our decade’s worth
and more of cowrie shells
gathered from that gravel patch
‘Memorial’ by Amanda Gorman is a poem about the past and how poets are able to use their writing to help readers relive it.
When we tell a story.
We are living
Memory.
‘In Memory of the Utah Stars’ captures the manner in which memories can provide us with both pleasure and pain.
Each of them must have terrified
his parents by being so big, obsessive
and exact so young, already gone
and leaving, like a big tipper,
‘Yellow Stars and Ice’ captures the unattainable nature of memory, even when it feels tantalizingly close at hand.
I am as far as the deepest sky between clouds
and you are as far as the deepest root and wound,
and I am as far as a train at evening,
as far as a whistle you can't hear or remember.
‘What My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why’ is an Italian sonnet about being unable to recall what made one happy in the past.
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘In Memory of My Mother’ is a reflection on the happy memories Kavanagh has of his mother after
I do not think of you lying in the wet clay
Of a Monaghan graveyard; I see
You walking down a lane among the poplars
On your way to the station, or happily
Read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,’ with a summary and complete analysis of the poem.
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.
‘Knows how to forget!’ by Emily Dickinson describes forgetting and how hard it can be to put something out of one’s mind that’s emotionally scarring.
Knows how to forget!
But could It teach it?
Easiest of Arts, they say
When one learn how
‘But Not Forgotten’ by Dorothy Parker speaks to the impact of one person’s memory on their past romantic partner.
I think, no matter where you stray,
That I shall go with you a way.
Though you may wander sweeter lands,
You will not soon forget my hands,
‘The Forest’ by Susan Stewart is a complex, cyclical poem about how memories can give new life to things that no longer exist.
You should lie down now and remember the forest,
for it is disappearing--
no, the truth is it is gone now
and so what details you can bring back
might have a kind of life.
‘Anne Rutledge’ by Edgar Lee Masters is an epitaph based on the life of someone who knew and loved Abraham Lincoln in her youth.
‘Jenny Kiss’d Me’ by Leigh Hunt is a powerful declaration of happiness in the face of the passage of time. A great deal of joy can be found in a single happy memory, the speaker suggests.
‘Chocolate Cake’ by Michael Rosen is an upbeat children’s poem that describes a child’s lack of control when it comes to his favorite dessert.
‘29 April 1989’ by Sujata Bhatt is a sweet, little piece about a mother’s sudden found pleasure in nature’s soggy musicality.
The poem, ‘A Hot Noon in Malabar’, is taken from the collection of poems titled ‘Summer in Calcutta” (1965). It
‘A Memory’ by Lola Ridge describes a speaker’s memories of a specific emotional night she spent with the listener on the shore of a tropic sea.
Siddal’s ‘A Silent Wood’ is a short, dark piece describing the misery of emotional loss and the power that memories can have.
‘A Text About Reading The Letter’ by Riyas Qurana is a free verse poem with twelve stanzas dedicated to discussing a letter between a lover and his beloved.
Adlestrop is based on a very specific and short event in the poet’s life. It describes an occasion when he
‘Alzheimer’s: The Wife’ by C. K. Williams is a powerful and moving poem. In it, the poet depicts a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s and a few simple moments from her day.
In ‘An Advancement of Learning’, a boy is faced with a rat, and through confronting it he addresses his fear and returns more confident.
‘Another Reluctance’ by Annie Finch is a beautiful short poem about a childhood experience. The speaker describes waiting for and watching chestnuts fall.
‘Anything Can Happen’ depicts a contemporary anxiety while referring to a mythological past. The poem has four quatrains with no fixed rhyme-scheme.
‘Artist’s Life’ by Ella Wheeler Wilcox describes the personal and emotional connection a speaker has to Strauss’ composition, Artist’s Life.
‘At Castle Boterel’ was written in 1913. The poem remembers a certain moment in life that is associated with a deeply significant memory.
‘Autumn Valentine’ by Dorothy Parker reveals two moments in the scope of the narrator’s pain — one when the pain was new and one when it had endured for a time in the shadows.
‘Barbed Wire’ is a poem about the tragic death of a horse on a summer afternoon. This piece explores the quick, sudden death of the horse.