Jessea L. Vaughan's "Life" is built on a simple trick: the speaker keeps saying "I speak of," and then piles up pairs of opposites until the answer becomes clear. Dreams sit beside daily routines, castles in the air beside little red houses, great deeds beside broken promises. Even the details are mixed in size and tone, from terrible migraines and nights spent crying to fuzzy cats and gentle touches.
The speaker doesn't seem to be sad or cheerful. The tone is steady and accepting, almost like someone listing what's in a bag. Nothing is ranked, and the good and the bad get equal space. Only in the last lines does the poem name its subject, calling life "the great mixture." That word is the point: the hard parts and the lovely parts can't be separated. The mood that results is calm, honest and quietly comforting, a reminder that a whole life includes all of it.