[Tyr Zalo Hawk]: 712.Essays.The Enduring Day, Eternally Seized

There comes a time in life when one must confront the idea portrayed in a simple, yet elegant phrase. For me, this idea was “Carpe Diem” or “seize the day.” Some say that this notion is foolish, while others wouldn’t want to live their lives any other way. There are poets known far and wide for their elaborations on the subject, and the very idea of seizing the day has blossomed under their watchful eyes and steadfast pens. There are others, however, which have subjected the idea to intense scrutiny, and a few who have outright rejected it. Over the centuries, the idea of seizing the day has changed little, but the reasons poets write about it have changed nearly as much as the times have.
The phrase Carpe Diem is Latin in origin, but the idea originated back in the days when Greek was the language of choice. Almost 400 years before Horace coined the phrase in an ode, a man named Pindar came up with the phrase, or at least he introduced the meaning behind it. Pindar’s poem “True, my heart” isn’t one that seems to be about seizing the day at first glance. It’s a poem that many would argue is about the passions of love, and how Pindar’s speaker experiences them. However, in the very first lines he does subtly introduce the idea of seizing the day. He makes a note to himself, saying that young men and would should enjoy the passion and beauty of their youth, and “Cull love / in one’s prime”, because, as an older man, he knows that that is “the appropriate time for it” (Pindar 1-2). Following this he does describe how he still feels the passion for young Theoxenes that he imagines anyone would, and yet he does admit, however subtly, that the youth are the ones who should be doing it. In the young, Pindar sees endless beauty, if nothing else, which he explains in detail in the remaining lines of the poem. This small, subtle introduction is where Carpe Diem had its origins, and while Pindar used it only as an introduction to his work, other poets had more interesting uses in mind.
Shakespeare is one of those poets whose work seems to cover every subject, theme, and popularized catchphrase in the history of mankind, and Carpe Diem doesn’t escape his overwhelming body of work. In the first dozen or so of his infamous sonnets, Shakespeare’s speaker constantly references youth and beauty as an opposite force to Time. For him, it’s nowhere near enough to simply have youth, or to be attractive, one must flourish and, most importantly, reproduce while one can. Not only does Shakespeare urge his listener to go out an seize the day, but he specifically wants the man to go out and get himself an “heir [who] might bear his memory” (1:4 [Sonnet 1: line 4]). He uses similes, metaphors, and hypothetical situation galore to illustrate to this the absolute importance of not waiting until it’s too late for the youth to use this excess of energy, and to find a suitable mate who can bear him a child as soon as possible, so that everyone involved might enjoy life all the more: “How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use,” (Sonnet 2:9) he claims, if there were only a child, one whose life would prove “his beauty by succession thine” (2:12). Indeed, Shakespeare’s sonnets aren’t just about seizing the day, they’re about making each day worth its weight in gold, therefore making the next day that much easier to enjoy, and all the more worth it. Although he advocates planning for the future, Shakespeare does so by expounding upon the necessity to first take hold of life and make the most of youth. Shakespeare requires that his lover seize the day not just to educate him, and not just to continue the population, but to give the youth insight into the nature of things like Nature, Time, and beauty. Carpe Diem is used here as a means to an end; it is one of the most relevant and pressing arguments one can give for why another should act here and now in order to prepare for the future.
There is, of course, always opposition to nearly every idea that man creates, and so too does Carpe Diem have its enemies. The most renowned of its enemies comes in the form of the courtly love poets, who mainly forsake the notion that the day should be seized, in favor of a more wholesome life experience. They are not the kind to expound upon the benefits of grasping at whatever is around, or to champion causes like casual flirting and frivolous sex. Instead, courtly love poets are the sort to whine and to pine over women who exemplified beauty, grace and all the other miraculous qualities they saw to be gifts from God in Heaven: “She walks with humbleness for her array; / Seeming a creature sent from Heaven to stay” (Dante, lines 6-7). They thought longingly of their loves, to be sure, but they would never seize the opportunity to approach them, to speak to them, and especially not to bed them just because they were in their youth. The rule of the courtly love poet was to admire from afar, and to dedicate oneself to pursuing higher and nobler goals than the pursuit of some intangible ‘day.’ Petrarch himself dedicated hundreds of odes to his love, whom he admitted, at first, he never saw without a veil on “the veil so governs me … the sweet light of your lovely eyes is shadowed” (Petrarch 11:12, 14). Dante and Petrarch wanted Heaven, purity, and they wanted the objects of their affection to remain distant so that they wouldn’t be tempted into sin, something which would’ve been all but impossible had they taken the chance to seize the day and allowed themselves. Of course, it could simply be that they were never given the chance to be that close, but to think that for “twenty-one years” (Petrarch 364:1) there wasn’t an opportunity for him to speak to her seems a bit absurd. Dante too has many poems for his love Beatrice which are both incredibly moving, and, at the same time, supremely unfulfilling in this small way. For others, however, this ‘ideal’ form of love simply wasn’t enough.
Sir John Suckling, a poet living in the early 17th century, was one of the most obvious opponents to the kind of love which Dante and Petrarch seemed content to experience. He read their poetry and decided to write his own response to it. He cried out to rid the world of this pining nonsense. No, he said, we do not wish and wait and want and grow “pale and wan” (Suckling, “Why so Pale” 1), we wish to live and love, here and now! “I will no longer pine,” he claims in a later poem, “For I’ll believe I have her heart, / As much as she hath mine” (Suckling “I Prithee” 19-20). He argues as Shakespeare does, that to wait and to idle is to hate oneself, and that one has to seize the opportunity to love wherever it presents itself. In “The Constant Lover” his final line concludes that should the woman he’s been in love with for three whole days have had even just a less attractive place, he would’ve bedded dozens more women in that time. This is the battle cry that helped to carry Carpe Diem through into the modern era, and without such a vivid and vivacious denial of chastity and melancholy, who knows if the idea would’ve had time to resurface by now?
Andrew Marvell took the same idea and ran with it. Instead of education, like Shakespeare, Marvell’s intention was to logically seduce using Carpe Diem as his anchor. In “To His Coy Mistress”, Marvell saw, as Suckling did the way that Dante and other courtly poets wrote and decided that this would not do. Disenchanted with courtly love, Marvell raised up his pen and told his mistress that time was short for all men, and so chastity was little more than a useless sentiment. “I always hear / time’s winged chariot hurrying near;” Marvell explains to his mistress. This passage is meant to set up the dichotomy between the verses in the first stanza where he expounds upon all of the things he would do were time not an issue. Time is, however, and so it’s necessary for the time-honored tradition of seizing the day to come into play. Marvell states very clearly that since time is an obstacle which simply can’t be overcome, the best recourse is to enjoy what you’ve got while you’ve got it: “Now therefore, while the youthful hue / Sits on thy skin like morning dew … let us sport us while we may” (Marvell 33-34, 37). He rejects chastity, because he knows that, eventually, all of our virtues will rot within us, and the worms will “try / that long preserv’d virginity” (27-28). Instead, he proposes that the world is ripe for plucking, and for their love to be had in the little time in which they have to have it.
There are many poets in the world who have wrestled with the notions of seizing the day. It is an idea which has survived well over two millennia, and continues to be a driving ideology in the lives of people, and popular culture. After all, what would Robin Williams have said to his students in Dead Poet’s Society if that famous phrase hadn’t been there to back him up? “Git ‘er done?”; I don’t think so.