Nostalgia- Billy Collins

Its a trip, back to the past! "Remember the 1340s?" i thought to myself as i re-lived the memory, i kept saying"Where has the summer of 1572 gone?"  as the next period of time hazily passed before my eyes or sadly "The 1790s will never come again" but i could not help thinking that"I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821."
 ...each stanza is a different point in time... 

  

Oh goodness, we could be anywhere in the world! All i can leave you with are clues

  "We were doing a dance called the Catapult. Oh how the special those crazy clothes were! "You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade, and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular, the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework." They are too fun to worry about comfort ha ha!

Next we all go to a disco perhaps we'd be "Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle"

However just looking out the window i can see "the color craze of the decade." 

Of course, i saw such beauty "Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.

I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees

and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light

flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse

and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks." 

Over here there are lots of words we don't know, in fact we don't really need to write them down! We just "borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.

                              These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code."

We didn't really meet anybody knew, we did see some body's sister though she was always busy after that as she "...practiced the Daphne in her room."

"Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,

and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.” we like the people there, they are...  Eccentric.

plus, i like that ,"Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today."

After that "I was even thinking a little about the future, that place

where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,

a dance whose name we can only guess."