Reed Whittemore, dead at 92, Poem: Commencement

[elleng]

In “Commencement,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1953 and is printed here in its entirety, he wrote:

The seniors in their drab robes, with their troubled

Destinies in their smiles, in a thousand chapels

Now manfully march from childhood into banks,

Shops, and offices, with their ranks

Unbroken still, and their eyes front still,

As if in all their classrooms they had learned

Only the virtue of marching, the vice of standing still.

Or so it seems — or so it seems to those

Who watch them with the knowledge of many such marches

And see in them only the mass, forgetting their own

Halting separateness years ago,

When they found themselves, in those robes, suddenly grown,

And suddenly, flanked by classmates, marching alone.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/11/books/reed-whittemore-former-poet-laureate-dies-at-92.html?_r=1&hpw

[BlueIris]

1. Damnit.

I love Reed Whittemore's writing.