Drawing on august sources, this graduation poem pokes fun at its own setting.
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By JOSH HAMMER
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By NEWT GINGRICH
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By DAVID JONES
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By JOSEPH CURL
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By DAVID JONES
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By JOSEPH CURL
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By GEORGE WILLIS
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By JOSEPH CURL
|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.
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