The Devil's Dictionary: Yesterday

Updated May 14, 2020 | Infoplease Staff
by Ambrose Bierce
YEAR
YOKE

YESTERDAY

-n.

The infancy of youth, the youth of manhood, the entire past of age.

But yesterday I should have thought me blest
To stand high-pinnacled upon the peak
Of middle life and look adown the bleak
And unfamiliar foreslope to the West,
Where solemn shadows all the land invest
And stilly voices, half-remembered, speak
Unfinished prophecy, and witch-fires freak
The haunted twilight of the Dark of Rest.
Yea, yesterday my soul was all aflame
To stay the shadow on the dial's face
At manhood's noonmark! Now, in God His name
I chide aloud the little interspace
Disparting me from Certitude, and fain
Would know the dream and vision ne'er again.

- Baruch Arnegriff

It is said that in his last illness the poet Arnegriff was attended at different times by seven doctors.

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