Poem of the Day: ‘At Graduation 1905’

Between 1898 and 1905 — a teenager, still living at his St. Louis home — the young T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) studied at the Smith Academy, a college-preparatory school run by Washington University. And before he left for the Milton Academy in Massachusetts, then for Harvard, and then for Europe in 1910, he composed a graduation poem for his St. Louis classmates — a set of fourteen stanzas of six lines of pentameter, rhymed abbaab: all very formal, all very traditional.

Except, perhaps, in the fact that the 16-year-old poet had produced a poem with few of the inspirational statements, the hortatory proclamations, that populate the endless run of graduation writing. “We go,” he notes, “like flitting faces in a dream. . . . / A bubble on the surface of the stream, / A drop of dew upon the morning grass.”

Already present in the poem are the young Eliot’s studied poses in pagan fatalism, learned from his boyhood reading of Edward Fitzgerald’s 1859 “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” and his certainty that St. Louis is not his destiny, already sensing the “distant lands” to which “we may have gone.” 

Present too is at least an inchoate notion of life as a journey away and back: “The end of all our exploring,” as he would write forty years later in “Four Quartets,” “will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” And present as well is the earliest intimation of the need to search for beauty: Although the future bristles “with a thousand fears,” he notes, “To hopeful eye of youth it still appears / A lane by which the rose and hawthorn grow.”