Four short lines, and the speaker loses an argument with themselves. They set out to dismiss someone, and by the end they have admitted that the dismissal doesn't work. Nothing about the author or the circumstances of writing is available here, so everything below rests on the words on the page, which is plenty to work with.
The poem is built as a verdict that collapses. The first two lines read like a cold assessment: "You're not what you ought to be, / Not worth remembering often." The person addressed is measured against a standard and found short. The word "ought" carries the weight of expectation, as if the speaker, or the world, had a blueprint this person failed to follow. "Worth" turns memory into a matter of accounting, where only some people earn space in the mind. The repeated "not" at the start of both lines makes the judgement sound firm and final.
Then comes "But," the hinge of the poem. The third line gives the poem its one concrete image: "your steps don't fade off the floor." Everything before this was abstract, a matter of ought and worth, and now we get a body crossing a room. The verb "fade" suggests something that should wear away, like a footprint in dust or the sound of someone walking off down a corridor. The speaker says it doesn't. Memory here behaves like a physical trace, and the speaker can't scrub it out. The image is also quietly domestic. A floor is where daily life happens, so the person seems to have left their mark on an ordinary, lived-in place and not on some grand monument.
The last line is the most interesting and the most awkward: "You're neither so good to be forgotten." We expect the opposite word. "Neither" promises a pair, a "nor" that never arrives, and the natural thought is "not so bad that you can be forgotten." Instead we get "good." One reading is that the line is deliberately lopsided, the speaker's logic buckling under feeling. Another is that the line quietly turns the opening on its head: being "not worth remembering often" is a kind of failure, yet this person is also not insignificant enough to vanish. Either way, the line's grammar leaves a faint wobble, and that wobble suits a speaker who is clearly not in full control of what they feel.
The sound of the poem supports this. The lines grow longer as they go, from about seven syllables in the first to about ten in the last. The verdict starts out clipped and decisive and ends up spilling over, as though the admission takes more breath than the dismissal did. The rhyme scheme is loose. Lines one and three, "be" and "floor," don't chime at all, but lines two and four, "often" and "forgotten," share the same unstressed ending. It is a slant rhyme, and the two words are close in meaning too: one about how seldom the person is recalled, the other about the failure to forget them. Placing them at the ends of the second and last lines links the speaker's wish ("not remembering") to its defeat ("forgotten").
The title, "Realisations #2," frames the poem as a moment of discovery, not a settled opinion. The number suggests this belongs to a numbered sequence, though the text alone can't tell us what the other entries say. What the title does tell us is that the speaker is learning something as they write. The "you" is never named or described. It might be a former friend, a lover, a family member, or even a past version of the speaker, and the poem doesn't say. That blankness lets readers fill the space with their own difficult people, the ones we have tried to rate, file away, and move past.
That is the poem's significance. In very few words it catches a familiar and slightly embarrassing truth: we don't decide who stays in our minds. People we judge as lacking, or who didn't live up to what they "ought" to be, can still leave footsteps we hear long after.