Seize the Day

 The first impression of the poem I get is that it is like a life handbook, a guide of how you can enjoy your day and be a good man.  The theme is straightforward, positive, bright, and clear.  The way the poem is written follow the time of a day, which can match the title, Seize The Day.  However, it is good not only because of the good theme or the clear structure, it is also great at the technique.

Technically, this poem has two rhetorical devices: personification and metaphor.  Personification is from line 5 to line 7 in stanza 1: "Does he pity us humans, who can choose not to break into song at dawn?"  Firstly, the poet started the poem with early in the morning.  When people get up, the birds will sing with the sunrise.  Then, she queried whether birds pity us humans, who can not have to sing in the morning.  It can be true, but as so far as I know, the bird cannot have such a high intelligence to have the complicated thought and emotion.  Therefore, I regard the words as a personification.  These words add more interests into the stanza and grab readers' attention immediately at the beginning of the poem to let them continue reading.  Metaphor appears from line 4 to line 7 in stanza 7:  "Without love/ your spirit will be a flower/ picked without purpose/ and thrown on the ground/ to be trampled by anyone"  Personally, I really love the sentence so much because of its ruthlessness.  The sentence is so cruel that I cannot imagine what else is worse than that.  Back to the sentence, the poet compares the person with a flower.  Once he or she loses his or her love, he/she will be like a flower, which he/she will be bullied by anyone so easily and so badly.  It emphasizes the importance of having love.

These two examples are two complete sentences, but they are broke down into lines.  It is called enjambment.  It gives me a short pause, which it makes me feel that the sentence is more fascinating.  The metaphor, for example, it breaks the sentence into five lines.  When I read it, I cannot stop to pay attention and stress on the first few words of each line, even though I know it is a sentence.  Then, after I stressed each word, "Without love", "Your spirit", "Picked", "And thrown", "to be trampled".  The first two words, "without love" and "your spirit", point our the object and a purpose of writing it, then the last three words are verbs, which give me a huge visual impact.  I can depict the picture of the process even more clearly because of these stresses, and it made me feel upset and uncomfortable.  It is one of the advantages of enjambment.

The theme brings a simple joy to me.  As the poem write, wake up with a lightful heart, take a good breath and enjoy the light of the sun, work hard and then clear mind when sleep, life can be much simpler.  Close to nature, find a way to appreciate your life and enjoy every day can make us live happily.