I stumbled upon this poem the other day, and just loved it. Partially because of the way it reads, but mostly because of the subject. I have relatives who do – or at least did – the whole “dress up in medieval clothing” thing. I also hear about how great the past was from co-workers and acquaintances (never friends – they’re way too smart for that) about how much better things were in the “good old days”. Hell, we’re all subjected to it by politicians who want to try and paint the 50′s as a golden age where nothing was ever, ever, ever wrong. It seems to be a fact of human nature – the past always looks better than the present, no matter what your frame of reference is.

Today’s poem uses sarcasm to point out the general silliness of this type of whitewashed nostalgia from the past by covering a few hundred years worth of “the good old days”. My favorite line is the one about “Find the cow”; for some odd reason that really cracked me up. Enjoy.

Nostalgia

Remember the 1340′s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
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.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.

The 1790′s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

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.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
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.

–Billy Collins