Please Help Me w/ Poetry Homework!!!

[poetryishard]

I would be so grateful if somebody would help me analyse this short peom!

Yesterday is History,
'Tis so far away --
Yesterday is Poetry --
'Tis Philosophy --

Yesterday is mystery --
Where it is Today
While we shrewdly speculate
Flutter both away

[Aurek_Waverly]

Analyze poetry? Is this for school? Because otherwise, poetry is written emotion. Unless you are a therapist, don't analyze emotion. Just enjoy it.

[poetryishard]

not really analyse, i just have to talk about the main idea of the poem

could anyone help me with that?

[poetryishard]

please????

[B-Mental]

Pick out the basic theme of the poem. I would say time. Now you need to relate the premise of poem to an emotion. Do the words associate with any of your senses?
Are there any other themes in the poem? I see a solid one for sure. You need to link any themes into your own words.
Let me know if you find the second theme.

[poetryishard]

wow, i am really bad at this, thanks for some of your help but i don't understand what the second theme is

[B-Mental]

the poem plays around knowledge and time, and how knowledge changes with time. You will have to expound on your own. May I ask whom the poem was written by.

[poetryishard]

Emily Dickinson

[Anna Seis]

Perhaps the idea could be related with an experience of past as an intangible thing, not a material thing, nothing you can touch or see or hear; only can be reached by memory and mind -and memory and mind are trachery.

[poetryishard]

You talk very poetic, so it's hard to understand.
Thanks to you two that are trying to help :)

[chmpman]

I kinda got the impression the poem was suggesting history is something that is expressed in thought from an outside perspective, after time for reflection. Just my impression.

[poetryishard]

bump.......

[Ron Price]

With all the efforts of others at this site, you should now have a start to finish it off. Of course, in some ways one never finishes analysing a poem. Others say you should not even try.-Ron Price, Tasmania.

[Aurora Ariel]

This is primarily a fragment about time.From my perspective, it's dealing with the time and trajectory one follows.Things are moving, changing and intermingling with the forces at work.While one is questioning things, more time is fading away.They think, write, and "speculate" whilst today becomes yesterday as the hours are, literally, "fluttering away".As history passes things may become more cloudy in the mind and memories are left in a network of blackness and unfamilarity.Trying to recollect, discover, and unwind these tangles once again may take more time, just as more time has "slipped through your fingers and passed swiftly around you" ;and once again, it has gone, like the light and illumination of understanding.Today becomes yesterday, and history is made.

[jon1jt]

Terrific interpretation -- with such clarity and imagination! A true writer is among us!