What of these instants men are living? Instants live on and death defy. Time is the constant not frail humans Who recede and die.
Turn back the leaves of your life’s volume; Study each page in retrospect. Who is that person found depicted? Him whom you expect?
No. It is not your youthful image But is a ghost intangible, Someone with whom communication Is impossible!
Robert L. Dark Jr.'s "Self in Retrospect" begins with a big, uneasy question: what happens to the moments we live through? The speaker's answer is bleak. Instants outlast us, and time keeps going while "frail humans" fade away. People are the temporary part of the story, not time.
Then the poem turns inward. The speaker asks you to flip back through your own life like a book and look at the person on each page. You'd expect to recognize yourself, but the speaker says no. What you find isn't your youthful image at all. It's a "ghost intangible," someone you can't reach or talk to. The last line, with its exclamation mark, sounds almost like a gasp.
The mood is haunted and a little melancholy. There's no anger here, just a quiet shock at how completely our past selves become strangers, as if we'd outlived someone we once were.