Soothsayer
What is it yesterday told? What will tomorrow relate? "Distance but lies in your heart." "Today moves her tent while you wait."
Louise Louis
SourceLicence:Public domain (US, unrenewed)
What is it yesterday told? What will tomorrow relate? "Distance but lies in your heart." "Today moves her tent while you wait."
Two questions open the poem, and both are addressed to time. What did yesterday say? What will tomorrow say? The speaker seems to be consulting a fortune-teller, as the title suggests, but the replies in quotation marks don't predict anything. They turn the questions back on the asker.
The first reply, "Distance but lies in your heart," suggests that the gap the speaker feels, perhaps from someone or something longed for, isn't really out in the world. It's inside. The second is stranger and more striking: "Today moves her tent while you wait." Picture a camp packing up and drifting off just as you arrive. Whatever the speaker hopes to reach keeps slipping away, and waiting only makes it worse.
The mood is wistful and a little teasing. The speaker wants certainty, but the oracle offers only mirrors and moving targets. Because the poem is so short, it leaves a lingering sense of longing, and the feeling that the present is always one step ahead of us.