Poems for Graduation

Poems for Graduation
On graduation day, parents and family often turn to poetry to express what they would like to pass on to the next generation--some small thought, a few lines of guidance, a gesture toward nostalgia, an elder's wisdom. The familiar (and perhaps too familiar) standards include Robert Frost’s poem, "The Road Not Taken," the Langston Hughes poem "Dreams," and Rudyard Kipling’s poem "If." It is no surprise that contemporary poets have offered many strange and lovely alternatives to these well-known verses. Robert Creeley has a series of three beautiful poems written for the his children’s graduations from Bolinas, from 1971-1973. In the first one, he writes:
This walking onand on, thisgoing and coming--this morning
shines such lovelylight onall of uswe're home.
The wisdom in this lyric is not purely in what it says, but how it is said; the circularity of life as Creeley sees it is built into the line breaks and rhythms, with each line propelled into the next. Yet, as he writes in the 1972 poem:
The honorof being humanwill stay constant.
When the Washington Post invited Rita Dove to select a poem for their "Poet’s Choice" feature, she remembered the occasion of her daughter’s graduation from college. Overwhelmed at the prospect of making a speech, she found the Billy Collins poem "Metamorphosis" to be a great comfort:
Ah, to awaken one morning as the New York Public Library. I would pass the days observing old men in raincoatsas they mounted the ponderous steps between the lions
carrying wild and scribbled notes inside their pockets. I would feel the pages of books turning inside me like butterflies. I would stare over Fifth Avenue with a perfectly straight face.
What new graduate would not benefit from imagining that she could transform into the act of learning itself, becoming the library, as if the books she had read were already a part of her? Emily Dickinson noted that the most important lessons she ever learned were not in books:
I went to SchoolBut was not wiserGlobe did not teach itNor Logarithm Show
"How to forget"!
E.E. Cummings takes on that very argument in his spirited, curmudgeonly poem, "yonder deadfromtheneckup graduate," in which he plays with the idiom "poeta nascitur, non fit" or "a poet is born, not made":
yonder deadfromtheneckup graduate of asomewhat obscure to be sure university spendsher time looking picturesque under
the as it happens quiteerroneous impression that he
nascitur
And, of course, graduation poems must include choices for teachers as well. Bill Knott imagines his students returning to see him in the poem "An Instructor’s Dream":
Many decades after graduationthe students sneak back ontothe school-grounds at nightand within the pane-lit windowscatch me their teacher at the deskor blackboard cradling a chalk: someone has erased their youth