Dickinson gave yesterday four different names in eight short lines
Yesterday, says Emily Dickinson, is history, then poetry, then philosophy, then mystery. Each label tries to pin the past down and each slips. By the end, while we cleverly speculate about where yesterday has gone, today quietly flutters off with it. The poem is over almost before it starts.
The first stanza is a series of confident definitions. Yesterday is history, because it is already so distant. It is poetry. It is philosophy. The claims pile up without explanation, as though the speaker were trying on hats. Each is plausible: the past is the raw material of historians, the favourite subject of poets and the puzzle of thinkers.
The second stanza changes the mood. Yesterday becomes a mystery, and the question shifts to where it actually is today. The turn in the last two lines is the sting. As we shrewdly speculate, both yesterday and today flutter away together. The act of analysing time uses up the present moment, so the very cleverness the poem describes is what lets the day escape. The word flutter makes time something light and alive, like a moth or a bird.
Brevity and compression were central to Dickinson's method. Critics today single out her clipped, acerbic lines, economical description and use of slant rhyme, and the Poetry Foundation praises the elliptical language she developed for what might be but had not yet happened. She was prolific, yet only about ten of her nearly 1,800 poems were printed while she lived, and she was little known beyond her circle.
Her early years point to the curious, analytical mind behind a poem like this. Her schooling was described as ambitiously classical for a Victorian girl, and at Amherst Academy she took English and classical literature, history and a subject then called mental philosophy. The principal remembered her as an excellent scholar, faithful in all her duties.
Source: Yesterday is History,
