Carpe Diem, Making the Most of Time, and a Few Dead Poets

Posted by Tom Fasano on March 23, 2010 – 9:30 pm

“We are food for worms, lads,” announces John Keating, the unorthodox English teacher played by Robin Williams in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society. “Believe it or not,” he tells his students, “each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die.”

The rallying cry of their classroom is “carpe diem,” popularized as “seize the day,” although more literally translated as “pluck the day,” referring to the gathering of moments like flowers, suggesting the ephemeral quality of life, as in Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” which begs readers to live life to its full potential, singing of the fleeting nature of life itself:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
  Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
  Tomorrow will be dying.

The Latin phrase carpe diem originated in the “Odes,” a long series of poems composed by the Roman poet Horace in 65 B.C.E., in which he writes:

Scale back your long hopes
to a short period. While we
speak, time is envious and
is running away from us.
Seize the day, trusting
little in the future.

Great Carpe Diem Links Here.

In the following commercial for Union Bank of Switzerland, the English actor Alan Bates recites Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” a poem that combines the idea of carpe diem with Thoreau’s idea of marching to the beat of a different drummer.

 

Some other examples of carpe diem poems include:

“We live in deeds” by Philip James Bailey
“The City” by C. P. Cavafy
“Are they Shadows that we See” by Samuel Daniel
“Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam” by Ernest Dowson
“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost
“Youth’s the Season Made for Joys” by John Gay
“Loveliest of Trees” by A. E. Housman
“A Psalm of Life” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“O mistress mine, where are you roaming?” from Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
“Nic Dwa Razy (Nothing Twice)” by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
“Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” by James Wright


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