If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time.

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

Then after a long time Annie wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In the dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and be the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen.

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.