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

[This past weekend, my younger son and co-favorite-Guest Poster Kyle Railton graduated from high school. As I wipe away proud Dad tears, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and contexts for this momentous occasion—leading up to a special weekend post on what’s next for the new grad!]

On two ways in which biographical contexts greatly enhance a seemingly simple graduation poem.

When read in a vacuum, George Moses Horton’s “The Graduate Leaving College” (1845) is a tender and sweet depiction of the final moments in a college student’s career before he departs that educational institution which has of course also become his community and home. A couple of word choices really drive home the bittersweet tone: calling this cohort of students “the pensive seniors”; and describing their final rest before the departure “one more transient night.” Although the poem’s last word is “joy,” suggesting that the graduate’s return to his childhood home is not without its pleasures as well, the overarching tone is one of happy but nostalgic remembrance and leave-taking, as captured by the first stanza line “My eyes let fall a friendly tear.” Again, a tender and sweet depiction of this experience eventually shared by most every college student, and indeed by every graduate of every kind of educational institution (and, yes, by their proud papas as well).

But when we add in the details of Horton’s quite amazing biography (which I first learned about when I taught him in my 19^th Century African American Literature course a few years back, and which I can’t do full justice to here so please do check out that first hyperlinked piece from the University of North Carolina’s Special Collections folks), this poem becomes significantly more interesting still. To quote a particularly relevant passage, which follows sentences about Horton being enslaved near Chapel Hill and developing relationships with the campus and town alike: “He earned money for himself through selling romantic poetry commissioned by UNC students. These poems were acrostics: the first letters of the lines spell out the subject’s name. Horton composed poetry in his head and recited the poems while others transcribed them.” “Graduate” is not an acrostic nor does it focus in any overt way on a specific individual, and so likely wasn’t one of these directly commissioned poems—but it of course reflects Horton’s relationship to UNC, his understanding of both the experiences of college students and of this pivotal communal moment.

Yet it also reflects more than that. Horton remained enslaved until the end of the Civil War, but for the four decades before that moment consistently used his poetry to argue for his freedom; such as his first poem, “On Liberty and Slavery” (1828), which he published in the Lancaster (MA) Gazette with the help of UNC faculty 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 principal means through which he expressed the layers of his identity that slavery could not circumscribe, then I believe we have to see one of his most striking formal choices—his use of the first-person pronouns “I” and “my” in the opening stanza—in a new light. Here at the opening of this poem, one seemingly connected to the UNC 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’s next, and even better, in what lies beyond that experience. At once a bittersweet detail, and a reflection of the ideals of education and graduation alike.

Next graduation connection tomorrow,

Ben

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