Today’s lively graduation-week Poem of the Day, by our poetry editor, Joseph Bottum (b. 1959), author most recently of the poetry collection “Spending the Winter,” forms the third movement of a four-part cycle composed for last year’s graduation ceremony at Princeton University.

This 2022 Phi Beta Kappa poem — a cycle entitled “Four Seasons” — signals its shifting moods with its change of meters. “Winter” occurs “in a grim tetrameter,” “Spring” in an appropriately “warmer ballad meter.” In “Autumn,” the year and the span of a human life wind down “in the blank verse of a philosophical pentameter.” But in the portion offered as today’s Poem of the day — “Summer,” the halcyon season in “a sprightlier Alexandrine” — the meter lengthens out beyond the expectation of our pentameter-tuned Anglophone ears, even as the summer days extend later and later into the night.

Fittingly, “Summer” provides the lighter, wittier interval between the tumult of the springtime and the closing-in of the philosophical autumn nights and the “winter’s news.” Drawing on august, and Augustan, sources, such as Pope’s “Essay on Criticism,” as well as Drayton’s “Poly-Olbion” and Auden’s “Under Which Lyre,” this graduation poem pokes fun at its own setting. All the college types, their differences obscured beneath gowns and mortarboards, are “forced to hear, before you leave the quad / The graduation speech — and then you must applaud . . .”

The second stanza catalogs the buzzwords and bloviations that are simultaneously so beloved of contemporary commencement speakers, and so much wind blowing over the heads of people frantic to escape and get on with the rest of their lives. But summer is the “season off.” The windy exhortations — “Think outside the box” — all evaporate in the sunshine of the present. And the future hasn’t caught up with anybody yet.

Summer (from “Four Seasons: A Graduation Poem”)
by Joseph Bottum

The summer opens slow, as graduation parts,
In gowns and mortarboards, the friends of liberal arts, 
The engineering kids, computer-science geeks, 
Religion’s novice monks, the Greek-and-Latin freaks. 

And yet, you’re forced to hear, before you leave the quad, 
The graduation speech — and then you must applaud 
Sententious sentiment, the opposite of song,
And like a wounded snake, it drags its length along.
There’s something in these days that wants to make us dabble 
In pleonastic bleats and brain-dead psychobabble. 
Beware such words as sync, but flee holistic first.
Thought leader, Meta, Think outside the box — but worst
Of all are synergy, new normal, ideates:
They mar the soul and bruise the heart of your classmates. 

Ye sacred Bards, that to your harps’ melodious strings 
Once sang poetic truths to mend the minds of kings, 
Bestow a season off, to summer with the Muse —
To choose the odd, to trust in God, to take short views, 

Before the year is washed again with autumn’s hues
And winter’s news.

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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.