In Louise Gluck's, "Life is a nice place," written in 1966, the poet uses the extended metaphor and irony to develop her idea that life is not really worth living, and to explicate that notion for her audience. By making a metaphorical comparison between life and a masquerade party, Gluck is, in effect, able to ironically demonstrate why life is actually not a "nice place".
The title of the poem sets the reader up with an expectation that the poem will explain the elements of life that make it such a "nice place". This title is repeated in the first line, as if it is a reassurance of that, and then the poem actually does live up to the audience's expectations, by describing a party·a truly "nice place," or at least it would seem, with "decorations", "music", and "prizes", but then the last line, "I wouldn't want to live there," reverses the meaning of the poem, and causes us to read it again, with this newfound understanding in mind.
This is a saying that has come out of pop-culture vernacular, as we often hear individuals saying "Vegas" or "New York" are nice places to visit where one would not want to live. Here, however, Gluck replaces that idea of a real, tangible place with a more vague notion of "life", calling the audience to question the very nature of "life" and "living".
Thereby, on a second read of the poem, we come to understand that the entire extended metaphor that equates life with a party, where "the decorations" are changed, "every season"·this referring to the changing of the seasons, and the altering of colors in nature throughout the year, which is, in Gluck's opinion, as well as her audience's, a beautiful thing. The music is beautiful as well; we hear "anything from birds to Bach," but here, we are moving away from the natural·eg "birds", to the manmade·"Bach" which signals the upcoming shift in the metaphor.
"The Host arranges for some clever sort of contest," the poem r
...