Eleven short lines, hardly any metaphor, and a title that sounds like the start of a shrug: "Everybody." Yet the poem makes a whole argument about being alive. Its speaker begins by treating life as something handed out to all of us, then slowly takes that guarantee apart. Memory fades, feelings fade, and a "next" (a next day, most naturally, though the poem never says so) is not promised to everyone. The central idea is the odd gap between how universal life and death are and how sudden and personal each one feels. Everybody takes part, but not everybody gets to continue.
The opening sentence is built with care. In "Everybody gets to live / Some day," the phrase "gets to" makes living sound like a turn in a game or a ticket drawn from a hat, a privilege rather than a right. The line break does quiet work too. "Some day" could mean "eventually," but alone on its short line it also reads as "a single day." Later the poem speaks of "the next" and leaves out the noun, so the reader supplies "day." If that reading is right, life is being counted in days rather than years, and the fragility of the final lines feels much closer.
Then comes the list: "And the love, and the grief, / And the fright, and the life." The grammar is loose. Does memory fade, or do love, grief, fright and life themselves fade? Probably both, and the poem doesn't choose. What stands out is where life ends up. It sits at the end of a row of emotions, as though being alive were one more sensation that slips away. The repeated "and" gives each item its own small push, so the things seem to be dropped one at a time. There is also a neat reversal. Here love comes before grief, but the unlived "next" is described as "its pain, and its joy," with joy last. The day that some people miss is imagined as ending on gladness, which is what makes missing it hurt.
The sound of the poem is as deliberate as its meaning. There is no regular meter and no rhyme scheme, but there is one clear rhyme: "day" and "away," on lines two and four, with the hurried "And then memory" wedged between them. The day rhymes with its own departure. After that, rhyme disappears and something subtler takes over. "Fright," "life," "time" and "die" all share the same long *i*. It is an echo rather than a rhyme, but it gathers force until the last word lands on the sound that has been running underneath. The line lengths work the same way. "Everybody's been here for some time" is easily the longest line, and then the poem contracts to "And sometimes," and finally "They die." It runs out of breath exactly where its subject does. Notice, too, that the only full stops come after "life" and after "die," so the poem lets its lines run on and halts just twice.
The voice is plain, almost entirely short everyday words, and that plainness is where the unease comes from. "Everybody" opens the poem and "They" closes it, so by the end the speaker has stepped out of the crowd and is watching from outside. "Been here for some time" sounds like guests who have arrived at a party or a waiting room, and "some time" echoes the vagueness of "some day." Then comes "sometimes," the poem's cruellest word. We expect the sentence to end "everybody dies." Instead death is made to sound occasional and almost like weather, something that happens now and then. Judging by the tone, the understatement is deliberate. It contradicts the generous opening, because "Everybody gets to live" cannot sit comfortably beside "sometimes, / They die." The flat delivery makes the contradiction harder to ignore than a lament would.
What makes the poem worth reading is that restraint. It offers no consolation: no sleep metaphors, no seasons, no promise of anything afterwards. The reader has to supply the feeling, and the gap between the offhand wording and the weight of the subject is where that feeling arrives. It also shows how much a small poem can do with a line break, a single rhyme and a repeated vowel. And it leaves one uncomfortable question. If living is something we "get to" do, what are we meant to do with the day we have?