Carpe Diem (yeah, right!)

Robert Frost has something to say about the backward wisdom of nostalgia. Seize the day - perhaps that is reminiscence speaking, acknowledging what the overcrowded present cannot do. Are they really strangers. It appears so. Frost's poem has the living taking place in our imagination, and the present is - well, too present to imagine. It's as though there needs to be a gap, a pause, to allow the imagination to reimage the present in order for true enjoyment, true "seizure" to occur. A kind of nostagia. Here’s Frost’s poem:

Carpe Diem
By Robert Frost

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
There 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.