Nobody in "Before Tomorrow" does anything heroic. The speaker gets out of bed, brushes their teeth, walks down a street, eats some candy, goes for a run. It reads like a to-do list, yet the repeated phrase "Before tomorrow" makes the list feel like a countdown. We never learn what tomorrow holds, and the poem never explains it. That silence gives the ordinary tasks a faint pressure, as if each one has to be fitted in before a deadline closes.
The central idea only arrives at the end. After nine lines of chores and routine, the final line turns outward: "Before tomorrow I will try to make you smile." The day's real purpose, it turns out, was never the teeth or the mile but another person. The poem moves from a body weighed down by habit to a mind reaching toward someone else.
The first stanza sets the weight. The speaker will "trudge like led," and the spelling is worth noticing. It rhymes with "bed" on the page and suggests the heavy metal, so the speaker's legs feel poured full of it. The word could also hint at being *led*, going through the motions without choosing them, though that reading is only a possibility. The second stanza keeps the sense of heaviness: the speaker is "passing others, / looking down at my feet." The middle line is the loneliest in the poem, since people pass without contact and the speaker's eyes stay on the pavement.
The third stanza loosens things. Humming is a small act of private cheer, and the line "while shoving my face with candy" is funny and a little undignified. "Shoving" suggests hurry and greed, the way someone eats when they want comfort more than manners. Then comes the best image in the poem: "one of them looked like the moon." The verb has shifted into the past tense, so the moon-candy seems to be a moment already noticed, or a small memory slipping into the list. After two stanzas of looking down, the speaker finds something round and glowing, and it is natural to imagine their gaze lifting with it. That is an inference from the imagery, not something the poem states, but the shift in mood is clear. The moon also quietly belongs to the night, the edge of "tomorrow," so the image connects the sweet to the deadline.
The sound of the poem helps the movement. The first three stanzas are tercets with an a-b-a pattern: bed/led, street/feet, tune/moon. The middle line of each is left unrhymed, as if the speaker is pushing through the dull part to reach the click of the rhyme. The line lengths are loose and conversational, with no strict meter, and the long, tumbling "while shoving my face with candy" feels crammed in just as the speaker is cramming sweets. Then the pattern breaks. The poem ends on a couplet, "mile" and "smile," and the last two lines lose their middle entirely. Both begin with "Before tomorrow" and run straight into their verbs, so the pace quickens like the running they describe.
The repetition of "Before tomorrow" works like a heartbeat. The speaker keeps saying "I will," which sounds confident, even stubborn. Only the last verb is hedged. Every other action is simply promised, but making someone smile is something the speaker will "try" to do. That one small word is honest, because a smile can't be forced the way a run can be finished. It is the only part of the day that depends on another person.
The poem's significance lies in this modesty. It doesn't claim that a heavy day is secretly joyful, and it doesn't disguise the trudging. Instead it suggests that a life is made of small, unglamorous acts, and that the most important one may be the least certain. For a student reader, there is something reassuring in that. You don't need a grand plan for tomorrow. You can get up, look around, notice a candy that looks like the moon, and aim a little kindness at someone else.