A soothsayer is supposed to tell you what is coming. The one in Louise Louis's poem does something stranger: she answers questions about the past and future with riddles about distance and the present, and in doing so quietly dismantles the question itself. Nothing is known here about who Louise Louis was or when the poem was written, so everything that follows rests on what the four lines themselves do, and they do a surprising amount.
The poem is built as a small exchange. The first two lines are questions, put in the plainest possible words: "What is it yesterday told? / What will tomorrow relate?" The speaker wants testimony from both ends of time. Notice the verbs, "told" and "relate," which treat yesterday and tomorrow as if they were people with stories to tell. Time is personified before the soothsayer even opens her mouth, and the speaker seems to expect that if only he or she can find the right listener, the past will confess and the future will disclose.
The answers, set in quotation marks, refuse that deal. The first, "Distance but lies in your heart," is a quiet sleight of hand. The question was about time, but the reply is about space, and then relocates that space inside the questioner. The word "lies" does double work. It means "rests" or "is located," but it also whispers "deceives," so the sentence can be heard as a claim that distance is nothing but a falsehood the heart tells itself. Either way, what feels like a gap between you and the thing you long for is not out there in the world. It is internal.
The second answer shifts the ground again: "Today moves her tent while you wait." Here the imagery changes from the abstract to the concrete, and the choice is striking. A tent is a dwelling for people who travel, so today becomes a nomad, a "her," who packs up and relocates while the questioner stands still. The poem never says where she is going. The point is the mismatch between the one who waits and the one who moves. While you stare at yesterday and tomorrow, the only day you actually inhabit has quietly slipped away from where you left it. Today is the one figure in the poem who acts, and she acts without being watched.
Structurally, the poem is tidy, almost symmetrical. Two questions are matched by two answers, and each answer runs on the same short, tight line length as the questions. The rhyme scheme links the second and fourth lines, "relate" and "wait," which gives the poem a pleasing click at the end. Those two words are also thematically bound: what tomorrow might relate is set against the act of waiting for it, and the rhyme suggests that to wait for the future's story is exactly how you miss the present. The first and third lines, "told" and "heart," do not rhyme, which leaves the opening of each pair slightly unresolved, as if the real closure only arrives when the poem reaches the idea of waiting.
The rhythm is light and speech-like, with a roughly galloping, anapestic feel in lines such as "What will tomorrow relate?" The unstressed syllables tumble toward the stressed ones, giving the questions an eager lilt. The answers feel more clipped and weighty, which suits their oracular tone. It is the difference between asking breathlessly and being told calmly.
What makes the poem worth reading is its economy and its quiet reversal. We expect a soothsayer to supply information, a prediction or a revelation. Instead the figure redirects attention, away from yesterday and tomorrow and toward the heart and the present moment. The poem suggests that the longing to know the past and future is itself a way of standing still. In four lines, with barely a decorative word, it manages to be both a riddle and a gentle rebuke, and it leaves the reader, like the speaker, holding a question that has been answered by being turned inside out.