William Stanley Braithwaite’s short lyric “Sic Vita” takes its Latin title—“such is life” or “thus is life”—and turns the phrase from a shrug into a grateful definition. The poem is about a person standing between earth and sky, feeling no barrier between the world outside and the heart inside. Its central idea is a kind of radical openness: freedom of heart, hand, mind, and step makes the ordinary world reveal itself as wonder, laughter becomes the only price of joy, and love finally appears as God’s way of proving beauty.
The poem’s shape carries that openness. It moves in short, songlike lines with two or three beats, closer to a hymn or chant than to a formal argument. The rhymes are mostly light and plain—“free” with “me,” “under” with “wonder,” “blowing” with “flowing”—and the repeated words keep the poem from ever sounding closed. In the first stanza the speaker begins with two matching phrases: “Heart free, hand free.” Freedom is placed first in feeling and then in action. The next line, “Blue above, brown under,” paints a simple vertical world: sky overhead, earth below. Between them stands a consciousness able to say, “All the world to me / Is a place of wonder.” The imagery is deliberately elementary. Blue and brown are not exotic colors, yet the poem treats them as miracle enough.
The first stanza ends with natural movement pouring inward: “Sun shine, moon shine, / Stars, and winds a-blowing, / All into this heart of mine / Flowing, flowing, flowing!” Notice how the grammar stays open. The lines do not report that something happened and then stopped; the participle “flowing” spills over and repeats, imitating a current that continues beyond the line. The heart is not a small, private organ here but a meeting place where the cosmos can stream through. This is the poem’s first version of freedom: not having no limits, but being porous to the world.
The second stanza turns from sky and earth to human life. “Mind free, step free” answers the earlier “heart free, hand free,” extending freedom from emotion and action to thought and movement. Then comes the poem’s most surprising economic image: “Joys of life sold to me / For the price of laughter.” Buying and selling appear only to be overturned. The price demanded is not money, ambition, or suffering; it is laughter itself. A free mind and a free step allow a person to meet life lightly, and that lightness, the speaker implies, is exactly what makes joy available. The claim may sound simple, but its logic is spiritual: the one who can laugh has already stopped grasping, and only the unclenched hand can receive.
The final lines gather human loves into the same current: “Girl’s love, man’s love, / Love of work and duty.” Romantic love, labor, and obligation are not placed in opposition to joy. Instead they are all “Just a will of God’s to prove / Beauty, beauty, beauty!” The compressed syntax matters. Love is both God’s will and God’s evidence; it is the command to prove, or the proof itself, of beauty. By ending on three repeated notes, Braithwaite turns the word “beauty” into something like a chord, not a conclusion.
What makes the poem significant is its seriousness beneath a playful surface. The title announces a summary of life, and the summary is not power, wealth, or fame but freedom, wonder, laughter, and love. The repeated participles—“a-blowing,” “flowing”—and the repeated final words make the lyric move like the wind it describes. In a form often associated with complexity and irony, “Sic Vita” remains deliberately unguarded. Its definition of life is that of a person with a free heart, standing between blue and brown, allowing the world to flow through, and finding at the end not a moral but a vision: beauty, beauty, beauty.