Sara Teasdale’s “Let It Be Forgotten” sounds at first like a wish for peace, but its real subject is the difficulty of letting go. The speaker asks that something unnamed—perhaps a love, perhaps a moment of intense happiness or pain—be allowed to fade as naturally as a flower fades, as a fire dies out, as a footstep vanishes under snow. The central idea is not simply that time heals. The mind may ask for forgetfulness while the senses keep returning to what once felt radiant, and the poem’s imagery is so alive that the thing it says should be forgotten becomes impossible to release.
Two quatrains give the poem the shape of a brief song or prayer. Each stanza closes with a clean second-fourth rhyme—gold with old, ago with snow—while the first and third lines trail away on softer sounds such as forgotten and ever. That pattern feels less like strict design than like a voice returning to the same note. The meter is loose and incantatory, built around the repeated falling phrase “Let it be forgotten,” which opens the first stanza and echoes in the second as “say it was forgotten.” The repetition works like a lullaby or spell, as if words could make forgetting happen.
Forgetting is defined entirely through fleeting, beautiful things. A flower is forgotten because it has one season and then disappears; it makes no effort to be remembered. A fire is described as “singing gold,” which makes burning seem both audible and luminous, then leaves only ash. The final image is the most delicate: “a hushed footfall / In a long forgotten snow.” A human trace is already almost inaudible, and the snow erases even that. Key words and their echoes do the emotional work: “forgotten” recurs across both stanzas, “long” stretches time into ballad-like distance, while “hushed,” “singing,” and “gold” leave a sensory afterglow even as the poem speaks of erasure.
The speaker also frames forgetting as something to say: “If anyone asks, say it was forgotten / Long and long ago.” That phrase borrows the cadence of storytelling and legend, which is the opposite of forgetting. To command someone to say it was forgotten is to put the experience back into language. The more precisely the poem describes what should disappear, the more permanently it holds on. The sharpest insight is the wish to be free of pain without losing the beauty of what once mattered. Time is called a “kind friend,” and the phrase has an ambiguous tenderness—age may blur grief and soften memory, but the speaker does not sound wholly consoled. The poem asks time to do what the speaker cannot quite do alone.
Much of the feeling is carried by sound. The repeated f sounds in “flower,” “fire,” “footfall,” and “forgotten” link the poem’s central images, while the long vowels of “gold,” “old,” “ago,” and “snow” slow the lines into something like a hush. The final footfall disappears into that hush, yet it leaves a mark in the reader’s ear. What makes the poem significant is its honest recognition that some experiences are too vivid to keep safely and too beautiful to lose completely. Teasdale turns that impossible position into a lyric of few words and many echoes, asking for forgetfulness in language that itself remembers.