What Is The Mood Of The Poem Have A Nice Day

In the poem “Have a Nice Day,” the author Spike Milligan, humorously delivers his overall theme of staying positive no matter what happens around you. The poem is about three people, the narrator, a man who is drowning, and a man who is sick and waiting for his doctor. The narrator watches a man who is drowning out at sea call to a man on shore for help. The man on shore says that he cannot help him because he has a medical condition and is waiting on shore for his doctor to come. Eventually the man in the sea drowns and the man waiting for his doctor dies from his condition before help arrives. The narrator then cheerful summarizes that apart from witnessing the two men die, and a fire in his apartment, he has had a very nice day. Milligan

The most obvious literary device used to lighten the tone is rhyming. When the story is approaching its climax, the man in the ocean hears the sick man say “I suddenly feel quite ill” (Milligan 14), he replies that the sick man should “breathe deeply and lie quiet still” (Milligan 15). Ordinarily a man who feels he is about to pass away from his sickness is no joking matter, however the rhyming takes off a most of the pressure and tension that the reader would normally feel in this situation. Milligan also uses alliteration to soften the emotional impact of the normally downcast lines in his poem. The man who is drowning asks the man on shore to help, however the man says that he has to wait for his doctor to arrive. The person in the sea questions how long until the doctor comes, the sickly man tells him soon, but “till then try staying afloat” (Milligan 10). When reading that specific line of the poem, the reader shifts his focus to the alliteration instead of the deeper meaning of the same line. If there wasn’t an alliteration in the line, then the attention would be to the fact that if the man in the sea cannot calm himself down and stay afloat for a few more minutes, his death is almost guaranteed. Without these poetic devices the poem’s tone and mood would drastically change from lighthearted