June 2, 2025: GraduationStudying: George Moses Horton’s Poem

[This pastweekend, my younger son andco-favorite-GuestPoster Kyle Railton graduated from high school. As I wipe away proud Dadtears, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and contexts for this momentousoccasion—leading up to a special weekend post on what’s next for the new grad!]

On twoways in which biographical contexts greatly enhance a seemingly simplegraduation poem.

When readin a vacuum, George Moses Horton’s “The Graduate LeavingCollege” (1845) is a tender and sweet depiction of the final moments in acollege student’s career before he departs that educational institution which hasof course also become his community and home. A couple of word choices reallydrive home the bittersweet tone: calling this cohort of students “the pensiveseniors”; and describing their final rest before the departure “one more transientnight.” Although the poem’s last word is “joy,” suggesting that the graduate’sreturn to his childhood home is not without its pleasures as well, theoverarching tone is one of happy but nostalgic remembrance and leave-taking, ascaptured by the first stanza line “My eyes let fall a friendly tear.” Again, a tenderand sweet depiction of this experience eventually shared by most every collegestudent, and indeed by every graduate of every kind of educational institution(and, yes, by their proud papas as well).

But whenwe add in the details of Horton’s quite amazingbiography (which I first learned about when I taught him in my 19thCentury African American Literature course a few years back, and which Ican’t do full justice to here so please do check out that first hyperlinkedpiece from the University of North Carolina’s Special Collections folks), thispoem becomes significantly more interesting still. To quote a particularly relevantpassage, which follows sentences about Horton being enslaved near Chapel Hilland developing relationships with the campus and town alike: “He earned moneyfor himself through selling romantic poetry commissioned by UNC students. Thesepoems were acrostics: the first letters of the lines spell out the subject’sname. Horton composed poetry in his head and recited the poems while others transcribedthem.” “Graduate” is not an acrostic nor does it focus in any overt way on aspecific individual, and so likely wasn’t one of these directly commissionedpoems—but it of course reflects Horton’s relationship to UNC, his understandingof both the experiences of college students and of this pivotal communal moment.

Yet it alsoreflects more than that. Horton remained enslaved until the end of the CivilWar, but for the four decades before that moment consistently used his poetryto argue for his freedom; such as his first poem, “On Libertyand Slavery” (1828), which he published in the Lancaster (MA) Gazettewith the help of UNCfaculty member Caroline Lee Hentz. “Graduate” makes no mention of slavery,nor is there any direct evidence in the text that its author is an enslaved person.But when we know that he was, and know moreover that his poetry was a principalmeans through which he expressed the layers of his identity that slavery couldnot circumscribe, then I believe we have to see one of his most striking formalchoices—his use of the first-person pronouns “I” and “my” in the opening stanza—ina new light. Here at the opening of this poem, one seemingly connected to theUNC students whom Horton got to know well during his time around Chapel Hill,Horton imagines himself as a college student, and one graduating to all that’snext, and even better, in what lies beyond that experience. At once a bittersweetdetail, and a reflection of the ideals of education and graduation alike.

Nextgraduation connection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Graduation texts or topics you’d share?