Carpe Diem: What Robert Frost Really Meant About Seizing the Day

Once, an older lady was moving into a smaller home, giving much away. A certain sadness seemed to attach, so I wrote her a letter, noting that most of what we keep is just to remember life by. Happily, if we just resolve to remember, we do not need the things. She was pleased.

Thinking on her again, I was reminded of Robert Frost’s poem, “Carpe Diem,” Latin for “Seize the Day.” Frost had a way of looking forward and backward from one stark, or quieting, moment.

Before more on Frost’s poem, a bit on the Latin phrase. It really does not mean “Seize the Day,” but something gentler. It comes from the phrase, “Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero,” roughly “Pluck the day, trusting as little as possible in the next one,” or just use your time well.

Interestingly, when Frost wrote his poem  – pointing out how the young are giddy, love abounds, worries few – he was suggesting something else: that we look backward and forward with gratitude.

His poem, “Carpe Diem,: reads:

“Age saw two quiet children
Go loving by at twilight,
He knew not whether homeward,
Or outward from the village,
Or (chimes were ringing) churchward,
He waited, (they were strangers)
Till they were out of hearing
To bid them both be happy.
"Be happy, happy, happy,
And seize the day of pleasure."
The age-long theme is Age's.
'Twas Age imposed on poems
Their gather-roses burden
To warn against the danger
That overtaken lovers
From being overflooded
With happiness should have it
And yet not know they have it.
But bid life seize the present?
It lives less in the present
Than in the future always,
And less in both together
Than in the past. The present
Is too much for the senses,
Too crowding, too confusing—
Too present to imagine.”

So, what is Frost saying? To me, he seems to be saying that the present is a bit overwhelming; much happens – whether younger or older – and it crowds the moment, is hard to digest, hard to put into perspective, and always will be.

But there is happy consolation in looking backward with gratitude and intention, and forward with anticipation. If we can master the looking back and forward, we will have – in an ironic way – seized the moment, or plucked it once again.

Perhaps a coincidence, but the lady to whom I alluded lived a long and peaceful life, happy in her smaller quarters as in the larger, and always quick with a story.