A speaker climbs the stairs to his secret room, and within a few lines the whole noisy world has followed him up: a lost aviator's shoe, a jazz guitarist, a failed election season. The poem reads like a day's mental clutter tipped onto the floor, and its quiet surprise is that the clutter turns out to be the point.
The name attached to the poem is Edward Taylor, but the mention of presidential primaries and the year 1992 places it in modern America, so it cannot belong to the Puritan poet of the same name. Nothing else is supplied about the writer, so everything here rests on the text itself.
The form is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. The long, conversational lines move at the pace of someone talking to himself, and nearly every line is a complete, end-stopped statement. That gives the poem a deadpan flatness, which the comedy depends on. "They found Amelia Earhart's shoe, size 9" is funny because of that last, bureaucratic detail. The jumps between topics are abrupt, and the line "1992: Charlie Christian is bebopping at Minton's in 1941" folds two eras together. The secret room seems to be a place where time and subject matter stop obeying the rules.
Under the jokes there is a retreat. The public world, with its failed primaries, gets dismissed ("We'll look for our excitement elsewhere"), and the speaker settles for the last snow, a gospel concert, a cat's sleep, Augustine's *Confessions*, a book about looking inward. The Gospel nickname "Sons of Thunder" sits next to a letter delivered by Overnight Express that he "slept through." Even the speaker's life is quieter than the grand phrases he collects. Then the cracks show. "Who am I to judge? I want to break out of here" ends a passage about fish that climb trees "out of stupidity," and the speaker clearly sympathises with a creature that has gone where it doesn't belong. "I'm saying that strictly for effect" undercuts the vivid image of a skull like a locker room "full of panting egrets," and "In time I will heal, I know this, or I believe this" slides from certainty to hope in mid-line. The parenthetical "(I guess I'm trying to be 'above the fray.')" works the same way: he catches himself posing.
The speaker's facts are shaky too. Lincos, the language for talking to other worlds, is usually credited to a Dutch mathematician rather than "the Russians," and the claim that a bee can't tell a square from a circle is odd given how famously bees build hexagons. So he is an unreliable encyclopedia. What he collects are oddities that feel emotionally true rather than verified facts. "Not even a postcard" from the cosmos echoes the letter he slept through, and together they suggest someone waiting for contact and unsure he would answer it.
The last movement turns all this scattered material into an archive. The room's contents will be "labeled and organized so thoroughly it will be a little frightening," a nicely uneasy phrase. Then the vocabulary shrinks what he "thought was infinite" into "odds and ends, a tiny miscellany, miniature stuff, fragments / of novelties." The pile of near-synonyms, with its soft m sounds, performs the diminishing. The next sentence reverses it. These scraps are "enough, maybe even more than enough, to suggest an immense ritual and tradition." It is the longest, most expansive line in the poem, and the final line is short and plain: "And this makes me very happy."
That ending gives the title its meaning. "Happy as the day is long" is a stock phrase for easy contentment, but here the happiness is earned. The day is long because it holds so much: grief, jokes, borrowed facts, half-believed cures. The poem's central idea is that a life, and a mind, can make a tradition out of fragments. It matters because it avoids both gloom and cheerfulness. The speaker is wounded, a bit absurd, and glad anyway, and the poem never pretends those states cancel each other out.