Carpō is a farmer's verb. Lewis & Short — the standard Latin lexicon — gives it as to pick, pluck, pluck off, cull, crop, gather, and its examples are picking flowers from a tree and horses cropping grass. It is what you do to fruit that is ripe. Lewis & Short do record forceful senses — the headword itself compares carpō to rapio, and a later branch renders fugitivaque gaudia carpe as snatch pleasures as they fly — but plucking is the primary sense, and it is the one Horace's line is filed under.

So carpe diem is closer to pluck the day — take what's ready, now, because it won't be ready later. And Lewis & Short file Horace's actual line not under any sense of seizure but under the figurative sense 'to enjoy, use, make use of'. The English translation everyone knows imports a violence that isn't in the sense Horace is using.

The context makes it clearer still. This is in the closing line of an eight-line poem, addressed to one named woman — credula is feminine singular, so Horace is speaking to Leuconoe, not to posterity. And what he tells her is domestic and small: stop consulting Babylonian astrology to compute your death date. Strain the wine. Spem longam reseces — prune your long hopes back, using a gardener's verb again.

Which makes carpe diem almost the opposite of its modern career. It's not a licence for excess. It's advice to stop forecasting, pour something nice, and pick what's ripe — from a poet who was, in every line of the poem, recommending that you want less, sooner.