The title that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) chose for his 1875 graduation poem was “Morituri Salutamus” — derived from the ancient gladiators’ call, Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant: “Hail, Caesar. We who are about to die salute you.” In Longfellow’s hands, however, it comes from old men, attending the 50th anniversary of their graduation, to those about to receive their diplomas and enter the world: “Young men, whose generous hearts are beating high, / We who are old, and are about to die, / Salute you . . . ”

Here in the spring season of college and high-school graduation, The New York Sun is offering a week’s worth of graduation poems. And the first of these Poems of the Day almost has to be, by rights, a passage from Longfellow’s 284-line “Poem for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Class of 1825 in Bowdoin College.” That college in Maine was a serious place, in those days, with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Longfellow both in the class of 1825, and the future president, Franklin Pierce, a friend just a year ahead of them.

Hawthorne died in 1864 and Pierce in 1869, both before their 50th college anniversary (“my classmates; ye remaining few, / That number not the half of those we knew”). Still, Longfellow’s Trojan image of old men watching from the city wall as the young warriors march out — “So from the snowy summits of our years / We see you in the plain” — forms a perfect analogy, as the poet deploys his heroic couplets, his five-foot lines rhymed in pairs, to remember the past — both to encourage the new generation rising up to take the place of their predecessors, and to urge the old not yet to surrender to lassitude and melancholy.

Morituri Salutamus: Poem for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Class of 1825 in Bowdoin College
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

. . . Ye who fill the places we once filled, 
And follow in the furrows that we tilled, 
Young men, whose generous hearts are beating high, 
We who are old, and are about to die, 
Salute you; hail you; take your hands in ours, 
And crown you with our welcome as with flowers! 

How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams 
With its illusions, aspirations, dreams! 
Book of Beginnings, Story without End, 
Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend! 
Aladdin’s Lamp, and Fortunatus’ Purse, 
That holds the treasures of the universe! 
All possibilities are in its hands, 
No danger daunts it, and no foe withstands; 
In its sublime audacity of faith, 
“Be thou removed!” it to the mountain saith, 
And with ambitious feet, secure and proud, 
Ascends the ladder leaning on the cloud! 

As ancient Priam at the Scæan gate 
Sat on the walls of Troy in regal state 
With the old men, too old and weak to fight, 
Chirping like grasshoppers in their delight 
To see the embattled hosts, with spear and shield, 
Of Trojans and Achaians in the field; 
So from the snowy summits of our years 
We see you in the plain, as each appears, 
And question of you; asking, “Who is he 
That towers above the others? Which may be 
Atreides, Menelaus, Odysseus, 
Ajax the great, or bold Idomeneus?” . . .

And now, my classmates; ye remaining few 
That number not the half of those we knew, 
Ye, against whose familiar names not yet 
The fatal asterisk of death is set, 
Ye I salute! The horologe of Time 
Strikes the half-century with a solemn chime, 
And summons us together once again, 
The joy of meeting not unmixed with pain. 

Where are the others? Voices from the deep 
Caverns of darkness answer me: “They sleep!” 
I name no names; instinctively I feel 
Each at some well-remembered grave will kneel, 
And from the inscription wipe the weeds and moss, 
For every heart best knoweth its own loss. 
I see their scattered gravestones gleaming white 
Through the pale dusk of the impending night; 
O’er all alike the impartial sunset throws 
Its golden lilies mingled with the rose; 
We give to each a tender thought, and pass 
Out of the graveyards with their tangled grass, 
Unto these scenes frequented by our feet 
When we were young, and life was fresh and sweet.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past, together with the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.