Few poems announce their anxiety as quickly as "Hours in the Sun." Before the first stanza is over, the sunlit hours "may not remain," and time's "ripples" will "nor pass again." The old carpe diem argument, that life is short and so should be fully tasted, is the engine here, but Susan Myra Gregory does something more daring than simply urging pleasure. She asks her readers to welcome pain along with it.
The poem moves in three stages. The opening stanzas are a catalogue of transient beauty: reeds murmuring overhead, a rose fed with red by some unnamed "ecstasy," grass that is "divinely bright" but will "flicker, and then flame, and pass / Into the night." The middle section widens the lens. A lover's "swift heart that leaps / To answer mine" is set beside the dead, who "give no sign / That autumn walks in gold." The sleeping lovers know nothing of seasons, and that is exactly the point. Being able to feel a day end is a privilege only the living have. The final stretch turns from observation to command, and the verbs get sharper: "press," "kiss," "bite," "burn."
The imagery that holds all this together is the rose, and it does double duty. Early on, the rose is simply beautiful, but by the fifth stanza the poem has collapsed flower and fire into one: "Red flames that are a flower, / To ashes burn." The pun-like fusion of red petals and red flame means that blooming and burning become the same event. That is why "Earth's flowing ashes fold / Full many a rose": the ground is thick with past beauty. The instruction to "Invert upon the hour / Your emptied urn / Of sweets" is a vivid one, picturing a vessel tipped until every drop is spent. And the wish "to be a rose" for "one shining space" is a startling modest ambition, since a rose's glory is brief by definition. The speaker is not asking for permanence, only for intensity.
The most striking turn comes in the last three stanzas, where beauty stops being gentle. It becomes a "thorn," a "keen edge," a "tear-tempered sword" that is asked to "bite deep" and "kiss, though to kill." Gregory is making a hard claim here: that the loveliness worth having cannot be separated from the hurt that comes with its loss. "Take we life's ecstasies / Though half be pain" is the poem's thesis in miniature, and the sword image carries it, since a blade tempered in tears suggests that love is forged through sorrow. The closing logic is stark: "love at last must prove / Unwaking sleep." Death is not a threat to be avoided but the very reason to press harder.
The form quietly supports this urgency. Each quatrain pairs long lines with short ones, with the second and fourth lines trimmed down and rhymed (remain/again, head/red, bright/night). Those clipped lines act like small stops, a breath cut off just as it begins, which mimics the way moments end before we are ready. The meter is light and flowing, close to song, and the poem knows it: "The moment singing flies, / Nor sings again" is a line about music that is itself musical. Notice, too, how many verbs of fire and flight crowd the poem: run, leaps, flicker, flame, burn, flies. Almost nothing in it sits still, and the only stationary figures are the sleeping dead.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to be merely comforting. Plenty of verse on fleeting time ends with consolation or a gentle moral. This one ends with an exclamation, "Red rose of beauty, live! / And white flame, burn!", shifting from red to white, from warm color to the heat at which fire is hottest. The final image is not of fading but of flaring. It asks us to treat awareness of death not as a shadow over happiness but as the thing that sharpens it, and it makes that case with real passion in a very small space.