'Into my own'

Graduation seems to be right around the corner. While everyone else on campus must be worrying about registering for classes next semester (that’s happening soon, right?) I am, along with the rest of the senior class, starting to realize that there are fewer than 50 days remaining until we’ve left our undergraduate days at Tufts behind us for good. Soon, after finishing up my last tests and projects, I will be sitting down on the quad to hear Madeleine Albright give the commencement address. I’m sure her speech will be enlightening and even inspirational, but what if we had Robert Frost instead? Resurrected from the dead especially for the Tufts University 2015 Commencement, what would the 131-year-old poet have to say to me and my classmates?

Although it is difficult to imagine what Frost would think of the world in 2015 (he would probably be horrified), I do think it likely that he would choose to read a poem for the occasion. Although many of Frost’s poems deal with the common themes present at events like college graduation and other transitional moments of life, perhaps none would fit the setting better than “Into My Own” (1915). Let’s consider this poem through the lens of our upcoming graduation and see where it takes us (and, for you underclassmen, remember that your time at Tufts is also rapidly ticking away).

Frost begins, “One of my wishes is that those dark trees / so old and firm they scarcely show the breeze, / Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom, / But stretched away unto the edge of doom.” The distant line of trees intrigues Frost, but will he dare to venture under their gloomy and mysterious canopy, away from his familiar abode? After graduation, our future can seem as deeply foreboding as this imaginary forest. The world of adulthood beckons, but are we ready to take on the challenge?

Frost, for one, seems to embrace the challenge of transition: “I should not be withheld but that someday / Into their vastness I should steal away.” The image of “vastness” here dominates Frost’s lines. While he appears eager to explore this vastness, the fear of the possibility of being swallowed up by the unknown also seems present. What is at stake here is not Frost’s physical safety, but rather his individuality, his own dearly held principles and ideas. At Tufts, we have certainly been challenged to mold our own unique identities, building on our own childhood upbringings, family lives, hometown cultures and other personal values in combination with our college education. Yet we must remember that as students, we have, for the most part, been confined to a limited bubble, isolated from what is sometimes termed the “real world.”

Upon release into the vastness of this real world awaiting us after graduation, our dearly held opinions and beliefs will be subjected to a crucible of pressure far greater than what most of us have experienced thus far at Tufts. How should we deal with this situation? The solution, according to Frost, requires a strong engagement with the outside world combined with a firm commitment to one’s own beliefs and values. He explains: “I do not see why I should e’er turn back,” even when pursued by his friends and loved ones. When they do overtake him, “They would not find me changed from him they knew -- / Only more sure of all I thought was true.”

Such confidence in our beliefs will be hard to maintain upon graduation, buffeted as we will be by the contrary opinions and nastiness of the outside world. Nevertheless, we cannot let this discourage us. For if, even 50 years after graduation, we can return to Tufts as alumni still firm in the convictions we hold today, only then can we truly claim to have come into our own.