The Good Life

Published in the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Life on Mars (2011), “The Good Life” is a short lyric poem written by the United States Poet Laureate Emeritus Tracy K. Smith. Appearing in the final section of her third book, “The Good Life” asks the basic but profound question: how can a person live a life of satisfaction? While Smith’s book is characterized by its focus on outer space and science fiction, this poem grounds itself in simple, everyday language even as it asks cosmic-sized questions about happiness, wealth, and actualization.

Poet Biography

Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts in 1972, but raised in Fairfield, California. She began reading and writing poetry in elementary school, where she was particularly taken with the work of Emily Dickinson. Smith attended Harvard University in the 1990s, where she was one of the few undergraduates to join the Dark Room Collective literary group. After Harvard, she earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Following her graduate work, Smith continued on in academia, teaching at a variety of institutions before landing a faculty position at Stanford University, where she taught for over 15 years. Today, she is a professor at her alma mater Harvard University. She has written four award-winning books of poetry and one memoir, and she served two terms as the United States Poet Laureate.

Poem Text

Smith, Tracy K. “The Good Life.” 2011. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Tracy K. Smith begins her poem “The Good Life” with a subordinate clause: “When…people talk…” (Line 1). The first line introduces the readers to both the casual tone of the poem and draws them in to the discussion with which the poem is concerned, prompting them to read the next line in order to answer the question implicitly posed in the first. The second line introduces a simile that connects the perception of money by “some people” (Line 1) to a hypothetical “mysterious lover” (Line 2). By Lines 3 and 4, however, the mysterious lover has already disappointed—stepping out to “buy milk” (Line 3) and leaving only to “never / [Come] back” (Line 4).

Smith introduces the speaker of the poem, here, who says that the simile developed in the first four lines (or perhaps money itself—the grammar remains ambiguous) makes her “nostalgic” (Line 4). The speaker’s nostalgia is for a time in her life when she had very little money, living only “on coffee and bread” (Line 5). Smith goes on to describe this time as characterized by constant hunger, when she went to work “on payday / Like a woman” (Lines 6-7) traveling well-less villages for a drink of water. In other words, the speaker recalls a period of life when she just barely got by paycheck to paycheck.

After the three lines developing the image of the woman traveling for water, Smith returns to her recalled experience of the days after payday while living in poverty. During this time, she would live “like everyone else” for “one or two nights” (Line 9). The final line defines what this living looks like (or more specifically, tastes like): after weeks of constant hunger and coffee and bread, the speaker feasts on “roast chicken and red wine” (Line 10).