Let Us Play Yesterday
poem 728
Let Us Play Yesterday - meaning Summary
Childhood, Freedom, and Fear
The poem frames a girl's imaginative play as a dialogue between childhood and eternity, blending schoolroom learning with metaphors of hunger, shells, and flight. It contrasts confinement and freedom—manacles, dungeons, shells—with the promise and peril of liberation. The speaker worries that release might make past bonds more painful, values the small miracles of sleep and light, and ends with a prayer asking God to preserve her liberty.
Read Complete AnalysesLet Us play Yesterday I the Girl at school You and Eternity the Untold Tale Easing my famine At my Lexicon Logarithm had I for Drink ‘Twas a dry Wine Somewhat different must be Dreams tint the Sleep Cunning Reds of Morning Make the Blind leap Still at the Egg-life Chafing the Shell When you troubled the Ellipse And the Bird fell Manacles be dim they say To the new Free Liberty Commoner N ever could to me ‘Twas my last gratitude When I slept at night ‘Twas the first Miracle Let in with Light Can the Lark resume the Shell Easier for the Sky Wouldn’t Bonds hurt more Than Yesterday? Wouldn’t Dungeons sorer frate On the Man free Just long enough to taste Then doomed new God of the Manacle As of the Free Take not my Liberty Away from Me
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