Nobody in this poem learns anything, and the speaker seems to have made peace with that. In eight short lines Ram Krishna Singh sketches a familiar scene, people talking about the past over a drink, and draws a blunt conclusion from it: we each judge ourselves, no one learns from others, and teaching hardly makes a difference.
The first stanza is one sentence with no punctuation, and it unspools like a half-spoken thought. Its opening claim is odd enough to slow down for: "There's little to sustain the past / looking beautiful each day." The verb "sustain" makes the past sound fragile, something on life support. "Looking beautiful" suggests effort, even make-up. Nostalgia here is not a warm glow that arrives by itself but maintenance work, repeated "each day." The line break adds a small wobble. For a moment "the past" seems to be doing the looking, admiring itself, before we see that it is something we are propping up.
Then the poem offers two options: "we bury it or review." Burying is silence, the funeral. Reviewing is retelling and assessing. But the retelling happens "over a drink with strangers," and the casual setting deflates it. Strangers are the safest audience for a polished story because they cannot contradict it. Yet they "don't know and would forget soon." That is the longest line of the stanza, and it trails off on the word "soon," as if the listeners' attention were already fading. Whatever we say about our past, no one will hold on to it.
The second stanza turns on "but," the poem's one real hinge. The lines also get shorter, six, six and seven syllables where the first stanza ran seven or eight, and they begin to sound like verdicts. "We are our own judge" picks up the courtroom flavour hidden in "review," since a review is a kind of trial, and moves it indoors. If strangers forget and the past can't be kept lovely by anyone else's attention, the only court left is private. The pronoun matters too. It is "we," not "you." The speaker doesn't lecture from outside but includes himself in the bleak picture.
There is no rhyme scheme and no regular metre, only the rhythm of ordinary speech, built mostly from short, plain words. "No one learns from others" has just one word longer than a syllable. This plainness suits the subject, because a poem about the uselessness of advice would ring false if it dressed itself in ornament. Still, there are quiet echoes. "Sustain" and "day" share a vowel sound. More noticeably, the last word, "teach," rhymes with the "each" of line two. That link runs from the daily effort of beautifying the past to the final shrug at instruction. And because the poem ends on the words of its own title, it comes back to where it started, which matches the repeating cycle it describes.
What makes the poem interesting is a paradox it never mentions. A poem is a kind of teaching, so one that claims teaching hardly helps seems to undercut itself. But look at the hedges. The past has "little" to sustain it, not nothing, and teaching "hardly" helps, not never. Those small qualifiers leave a narrow gap through which something might still pass. The poem makes no promise that it will.
It also refuses to console. Many poems about memory soothe us with the idea that the past can be redeemed or that experience can be handed down. This one suggests that each person must work through their own past alone, and that conversation and advice mostly slide off. You may disagree, and the poem would accept that. If we are our own judge, then deciding whether Singh is right is a job only you can do, which may be the strongest evidence for his argument.