Most birthday verses hurry to cheer. Pope's opens with a blessing, then within ten lines calls the day "the funeral of the former year." The poem is a wish for a woman identified only by initials, and its central idea is that a birthday is worth celebrating only if time adds something to a life. If each year simply drains the last, the day is a cause for mourning.
The first stanza builds the case by contrast. The opening line gathers its gifts under a repeated "long": "Long health, long youth, long pleasure, and a friend." The pattern breaks at the end, where the last blessing is a person, not a quantity of time, and a friend is the one thing here that cannot simply be measured out. Pope then rejects the usual gifts, "toys the female world admire, / Riches that vex, and vanities that tire." The line is balanced, with each noun followed by a verb that undoes it. It also flatters the addressee at the expense of other women, which modern readers may find a little smug. Then comes the image at the poem's centre, a life that, "like a sieve, let[s] every blessing through." It is homely and exact. Nothing dramatic is lost, only a little each year, "some joy still lost... some sad reflection more." The stanza's closing question, "Is that a birthday?", interrupts the smooth rhythm and leaves the grim answer to the final line. The alliteration of "funeral of the former year" makes that line sound like a bell.
The second stanza answers the first with a series of commands. "Let joy or ease, let affluence or content... / Calm every thought, inspirit every grace." Where the first stanza described how things go wrong, this one dictates how they should go. The verbs are warm and physical: joy should "glow in thy heart, and smile upon thy face." The phrase "the gay conscience of a life well spent" uses "gay" in its older sense of cheerful. It makes a moral point as well, since the happiness Pope wishes for rests on having lived well. This is the opposite of the "vanities" he dismissed earlier. "Let day improve on day, and year on year" reverses the sieve, since here each period of time builds on the one before.
The poem ends with death, and Pope handles it gently. Death is "unfelt" and arrives "in some soft dream, or ecstasy of joy." The grave is a "Sabbath," a day of rest, and the final line looks past it: "And wake to raptures in a life to come." The poem began by treating the passing year as a small death. It ends by treating real death as a small sleep, so the fear the first stanza raises is answered by Christian hope. That closing rhyme is slightly uneasy, though. "Tomb" and "come" look like a rhyme on the page but no longer sound like one to modern ears.
The form carries all this. The poem is written in iambic pentameter rhymed couplets, a form that suits Pope's habit of setting ideas against each other: "send / friend," "admire / tire," "year / fear." The couplets give each wish a firm ending, which fits a poem that wants to make its blessings feel secure. The first stanza uses the form to tighten a threat, with "clear" and "year" locking together as the funeral comparison lands. The second uses it to suggest calm, one balanced pair after another.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it won't settle for a pleasant greeting. A conventional birthday poem ignores the passing of time, and this one starts from it. The wish gains weight because the poem has first shown what an empty year looks like. The initials "M. B." suggest a private, real relationship, but the poem's argument reaches beyond it. Whatever else we wish for someone, it says, we should wish that their years add up to something.