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.”

This is not the great poetry of modern failure that Eliot would write, from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” through “The Hollow Men,” nor the great poetry of modern hope that Eliot would write from “Ash Wednesday” through such work as “Murder in the Cathedral.” “At Graduation 1905” is, however, a talented boy’s take on the promise and the fear that mark departure from an alma mater — and thus a fitting poem with which to end The New York Sun’s week of graduation poetry.

At Graduation 1905
by T.S. Eliot

I
Standing upon the shore of all we know
We linger for a moment doubtfully,
Then with a song upon our lips, sail we
Across the harbor bar — no chart to show,
No light to warn of rocks which lie below,
But let us yet put forth courageously.

II
As colonists embarking from the strand
To seek their fortunes on some foreign shore
Well know they lose what time shall not restore,
And when they leave they fully understand
That though again they see their fatherland
They there shall be as citizens no more.

III
We go; as lightning-winged clouds that fly
After a summer tempest, when some haste
North, South, and Eastward o’er the water’s waste,
Some to the western limits of the sky
Which the sun stains with a many splendid dye,
Until their passing may no more be traced.

IV
Although the path be tortuous and slow,
Although it bristle with a thousand fears,
To hopeful eye of youth it still appears
A lane by which the rose and hawthorn grow.
We hope it may be; would that we might know!
Would we might look into future years.

V
Great duties call — the twentieth century
More grandly dowered that those which came before,
Summons — who knows what time may hold in store,
Or what great deed the distant years may see,
What conquest over pain and misery,
What heroes greater than were e’er of yore!

VI
But if this century is to be more great
Than those before, her sons must make her so,
And we are her sons, we must go
With eager hearts to help mold well her fate,
And see that she shall gain such proud estate
And shall on future centuries bestow

VII
A legacy of benefits — may we
In future years be found with those who try
To labor for the good until they die,
And ask no other guerdon than to know
That they have helpt the cause to victory,
That with their aid the flag is raised on high.

VIII
Sometime in distant years when we are grown
Gray-haired and old, whatever be our lot,
We shall desire to see again the spot
Which, whatsoever we have been or done
Or to what distant lands we may have gone,
Through all the years will ne’er have been forgot.

IX
For in the sanctuaries of the soul
Incense of altar-smoke shall rise to thee
From spotless fanes of lucid purity,
O school of ours! The passing years that roll
Between, as we press to the goal,
Shall not have power to quench the memory.

X
We shall return; and it will be to find
A different school from that which now we know;
But only in appearence ’twill be so.
That which has made it great, not left behind,
The same school in the future shall we find
As this from which as pupils now we go.

XI
We go; like flitting faces in a dream;
Out of thy care and tutelage we pass
Into the unknown world—class after class,
O queen of schools—a momentary gleam,
A bubble on the surface of the stream,
A drop of dew upon the morning grass;

XII
Thou dost not die — for each succeeding year
Thy honor and thy fame shall but increase
Forever, and may stronger words than these
Proclaim thy glory so that all may hear;
May worthier sons be thine, from far and near
To spread thy name o’er distant lands and seas!

XIII
As thou to thy departing sons hast been
To those that follow may’st thou be no less;
A guide to warn them, and a friend to bless
Before they leave thy care for lands unseen;
And let thy motto be, proud and serene,
Still as the years pass by, the word “Progress!”

XIV
So we are done; we may no more delay;
This is the end of every tale: “Farewell,”
A word that echoes like a funeral bell
And one that we are ever loth to say.
But ’tis a call we cannot disobey,
Exeunt omnes, with a last “farewell.”

___________________________________________ 
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.