"Carpe Diem" Doesn't Mean "Seize the Day"

In some fairly important ways — it means just the opposite.

7 Drawings of Birds, Flowers, and Insects (British Museum)

Surely the only way the Roman poet Horace managed to bang out four books of odes, two books of satires, and a treatise about poetry in his lifetime was with a #RiseAndGrind mentality. But shockingly, the Romans didn’t know about “Hustle Culture,” their top poets never even mentioned the idea of a #grindset, and Extreme Productivity podcasts wouldn’t be invented for another two thousand-odd years. To make matters worse, Horace’s iconic lifehacking catchphrase, “Carpe Diem”—meaning “Seize the Day”—wasn’t a lifehack, wasn’t a catchphrase, and doesn’t really mean “Seize the Day” after all.

The real way Horace managed to find time for all that poetry is through the time-honored technique of landing a very easy civil service job so he could wrestle with Asclepiadean meter during work hours, but the story of how “Carpe Diem” came to be a well-meaning but overly energetic bumper sticker is a bit more complicated. 

“Carpe Diem” has had two major comebacks since its first appearance in Odes 1.11—the first thanks to the 17th century author of The Hesperides, Robert Herrick, and the second thanks to Flubber star Robin Williams. In fairness to both of these talented boys, the second carpe diem comeback is due to one of Robin Williams’s most memorable performances, and it’s very specifically in reference to the poetry of Robert Herrick. 

But whatever nuance there may have been in Williams’s “Carpe Diem” speech from Dead Poets Society, people only really remembered its final line: 

“Carpe diem. Seize the day boys. Make your lives extraordinary.” 

Which, whatever—Dead Poets Society absolutely slaps and it’s kind of lovely to think that anyone’s quoting Horace at all in 2023, but the fact of the matter is that “Carpe Diem” is much better rendered as “Pluck the Day.” 

The definitive piece on this is Maria S. Marsilio’s “Two Notes on Horace, Odes 1, 11,”¹ which points out that the original phrase occurs amongst a wealth of images associated with gathering the fruits of nature—“straining” wine (for immediate consumption) and “pruning back” one’s long-term goals to enjoy the moment. But even outside of this context, the word carpe (which is often rendered as “seize”) is a Latinization of the Greek καρπίζειν (carpizein), which means “enjoy the fruits of,” via καρπός (carpos), which means “fruit.” 

All of these various “carp” words have their origin in the Proto-Indo-European *kerp-, which means “pluck, gather, or harvest,” and which literally gives us “harvest,” as well as “excerpt,” (something that is plucked), “carpet” (something originally made from plucked fabric), “carping” (a more aggro take on plucking), and “scarce” (you missed the morning rush and your coworkers plucked all the good bagels). 

The Herrick poem that’s referenced in Dead Poets Society (“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”) is the definitive example of the brief carpe diem mania that bubbled up in the 17th century, and as with Horace, it’s asking us to gather and pluck the fruits of the day rather than to “grab life by the horns,” “just do it,” “strike while the iron is hot” or—my favorite productivity expression that makes you question whether productivity is all it’s cracked up to be—“eat the frog.” It also fits in with a long line of carpe diem poems (including Horace’s original ode) that are at least partially about trying to cajole young women out of their petticoats.²

Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying:

And this same flower that smiles to day,

To morrow will be dying.

The Venn diagram of “Seize the Day” and “Pluck the Day” is not two distinct circles, but there’s a gulf of meaning between seizing—which is an act of war—and plucking, which is part of a harvest. And as life (or even productivity) advice goes, it’s a good deal less exhausting to approach each morning with a plan to gather the day’s abundant offerings rather than preparing to sneak up on it from behind, bop it on the head, and make off with the plunder. 

The full context of Odes 1:11 shows carpe diem to be a good deal more gentle, with hardly any bopping in sight (apart from the bopping of the Tyrrhenian sea against the rocks). The poem is addressed to a servant girl, and you can read it as fatherly advice or a bit of a come-on,³ but the overall message is rather wistful: Don’t drive yourself crazy thinking about the future because a) you might die anyway, and b) the day still has more fruits for us to harvest. Doesn’t exactly fit on a bumper sticker, but it’s a whole lot better than #RiseAndGrind. 

Here’s my⁴ translation.  

Don't ask, Leuconoe, for we mustn't know what plans the gods have made

For me, for you—nor should you consult the Babylonian

Astrologers. Much better to accept whatever comes, should

Jupiter give us many winters or just this last, which

Even now depletes the Tyrrhenian sea against the out-thrust rocks.

Be wise, strain the wine, and prune back your lengthy hopes

To within reach. While we've been talking, jealous time has fled

The scene. Pluck the day—don't give your trust to the future.

1. And Chi Luu’s excellent  commentary on it for JSTOR Daily, “How Carpe Diem Got Lost in Translation.”

2. The other really famous carpe diem poem in this vein is Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” which begins, “Had we but world enough and time,/This coyness, lady, were no crime.” 

3. There’s more on who Leuconoe may or may not be to the poet in “Horace’s ‘Carpe Diem,’” by R.E. Grimm, who sees Horace’s posture in the poem as professorial, but all the plucking and “this might be our last winter” talk does imply at least a little bit of a flirty vibe.

4. I’m absolutely not a Latin scholar, but I didn’t like anything I found online and I was able to grind this one out with my schoolboy Latin.