Looking Back at the Past

Many times people look back to the past as a coping mechinism to deal with the present. Many writers reflect on the past in poetry to signify a yearning or hardship that exists in the present. In "Bored' by Margaret Atwood, "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke, "The Video" by Fleur Adcock, and "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas, all authors present the poems in relating to the past, with a way of dealing with the present.
In "Bored" by Margaret Atwood, the speaker talks about being bored in the past. She talks in run-on sentances and in a cyclic fasion that emphasis not only the boredom she faced in the past, but also a yearning that she has for the past. When the speaker says, "Or sat in the back of the car, or sat still in boats, sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel he drove, steered, paddled;" she repeates herself in a way that not only makes the past a vivid image now, but also shows a yearning for the past. While the speaker may have been bored in the past, she misses that boredom which she spent with her father, who presently is dead.
The speaker of "My Papa's Waltz", does not have a yearning for the past, rather focuses on it in a way that he uses to cope with the present. The speaker speaks of the way his father treated him as a young boy, characterizing him by likening the way he treated him to dancin the waltz. The speaker remarks, "The whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy; but I hung on like death: such waltzing was not easy, " here the speaker looks back on the past with no yearning, almost in a way to deal with what his father has left him as through his ill treatment.
In Adcock's "The Video," the speaker uses the past as a way to characterize the main person in the poem, Ceri. The speaker divided the poem into two parts, the past and the present. In the past the speaker remarks quickly on the life of Ceri, being an only child and how she had her entire family to herself. Then in the second part of the poem the speaker talks of how Ceri's life currently is, and how it is different due to her sister being born.The speaker is able to show the underlying theme of a yearning for the past, or how Ceri yearned for the past by telling how Ceri constantly replayed the video of her sister being born, watching her come out and then reversing it so she would go back in. This action signifies Ceri's yearning for the past, rather the time of before her sister was born.
The speaker in Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill," uses diction and imagry to create an image of his past. The speaker's yearning for the past is evident in how he speaks of the farm that he inhabited in the past. The speaker remarks, "And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns about the happy yard and singing as the farm was home..." here the diciton points out a yearning for the past, being that the past was a better time where the speaker enjoyed nature and his life, using words such as carefree and the color green associated with health and happiness.
Sometimes in literary works it is hard to figure out for what reason authors tend to focus on the past. But for many it is a way of coping with the present and thinking of better times, while for others it is something so bad they can never forget,