Poem of the Day: ‘The Graduate Leaving College’ 

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.