As we continue to celebrate commencement season with a week of poems about graduation, we turn today to George Moses Horton (1798–1883), whose own biography makes for the sort of triumph-over-adversity story so often embraced by commencement speakers. Born a slave, the sixth of ten children, on the plantation of a William Horton in North Carolina, George Moses Horton was an autodidact, teaching himself to read through hearing the Bible read aloud. He was the first African-American writer since the nation’s founding to publish a book of any kind, the first writer to publish a literary work in North Carolina, and the only writer in American history to publish a book while enslaved.

As a young man, sent from home to sell fruits and vegetables in nearby Chapel Hill, Horton began to make pocket money by writing love poems for students at the University of North Carolina. The students, in turn, also supplied him with books for the furthering of his education. Today’s Poem of the Day, while not a love letter written for a college student, instead constitutes a love letter to The College Graduate, as an archetype. The verse itself, in abab quatrains of two tetrameter lines bracketed by trimeter, is forced in places, with syntax inverted, passive voice resorted to, to make the rhymes. 

Adopting the voice of the graduate, but inevitably conscious of the gap between that graduate’s future possibilities and his own, Horton writes of graduation as a kind of transcendence, as if the departing seniors were bodily assumed into heaven. Meanwhile, even “servants” — surely the same kind of “servants” about whom our Tuesday poet, Caroline Howard Gillman, was fond of writing — appear without irony or bitterness. The whole of the poem, though we may find it unsophisticated, resonates with a generosity of imagination rare and impressive in any age. 

The Graduate Leaving College 
by George Moses Horton 
 
What summons do I hear? 
The morning peal, departure’s knell; 
My eyes let fall a friendly tear, 
And bid this place farewell. 

Attending servants come, 
The carriage wheels like thunders roar, 
To bear the pensive seniors home, 
Here to be seen no more. 

Pass one more transient night, 
The morning sweeps the college clean; 
The graduate takes his last long flight, 
No more in college seen. 

The bee, which courts the flower, 
Must with some pain itself employ, 
And then fly, at the day’s last hour, 
Home to its hive with joy. 

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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 and 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.