For nearly all of its length, Victoria Skelton's "Memory" sounds like someone at the end of her patience, talking to a person she loves. The speaker coaxes, scolds, praises and pleads. Only in the final line does the poem name who is being addressed: "Memory I'm letting you go." The title has told us all along, but the poem asks us to hear it as a person first. Memory becomes a stubborn companion the speaker has tried, and failed, to carry.
The central idea is the exhaustion that comes with loving something you cannot fix. The speaker's verbs are physical and hopeful: "I lifted you up," "I even tried carrying you." Memory's replies are all refusal: "you pushed me down," "You do not try." The poem never says what memory has done wrong. Judging by the imagery, it could be a faculty that will not hold on, or a painful past that will not settle, and the poem stays open to both readings. That vagueness helps. Anyone who has tried to help someone, or something, that wouldn't be helped can recognise the situation.
The poem's attitude to memory is mixed. "You are great you are strong" sits beside "you carry on like a child," and the speaker moves from admiration to impatience in two lines. Later comes the generous "You are so much more than what you make yourself out to be," which sounds like something a parent or teacher says to a gifted but difficult young person. The phrase "brilliant head" then gives memory a mind of its own, one the speaker cannot see into: "If only I knew what was going through" it. This is the poem's most tender moment, because the speaker's frustration comes from wanting to understand.
Structurally, the poem is plain. There is no regular rhythm, no stanza breaks, and almost no punctuation. Lines such as "You are great you are strong" run together without a comma, which gives the voice a breathless, unedited quality, as though the speaker is thinking aloud. The language is conversational, and even the one proverb she borrows, "it's better to try and fail … than to never try at all," is quoted as something "once told" to her. She then turns it on memory with the blunt question "So why do you not?" The advice that kept her going is now a reproach, and the shift shows how worn down she is.
Rhyme appears almost by accident, and that makes it striking. "Brain" and "pain" fall on consecutive lines: "The thought of letting you go busted in my brain / I feel the discomfort of sadness and pain." Elsewhere the poem has no real rhyme, so the sound locks in at the moment of hurt. The verb "busted" is also unexpected. It is slangy and a little violent, as if the idea of release broke something open in her head. The wording is not polished, and it feels honest because of that.
The poem is also built as a question and its answer. It opens with "What should I do with you?" and ends with a decision. The earlier line "The thought of letting you go" returns almost unchanged in the last line, but the thought has now become an act. The oxymoron "a beautiful burden but too much for me" holds the whole poem in a few words. She doesn't stop finding memory beautiful; she simply can't carry it any further.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it won't be sentimental about this. It allows love and tiredness to exist together, and it treats giving up as something that can hurt without being a betrayal. The short, flat final line has no exclamation and no flourish, only the quiet sound of someone setting down a weight she has carried for as long as she could.