These are words her grandchildren’s grammar-school classmates will memorize, much the way today’s grandparents memorized “The Road Not Taken” and its meditation on two roads that “diverged in a wood.” Those schoolchildren of the future will understand that the title “The Hill We Climb” was both a metaphor and a reference - “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it” - to the rioters who besieged the Capitol two weeks before the Inauguration in which Gorman had her star turn. She stood with a poise that was elegant, and eloquence itself.įrost opened his poem “The Gift Outright” with an unforgettable line: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” So poignant a notion was it that Gorman alluded to it, writing, “the dawn is ours before we knew it.”įrost's poem looked at the nation before its creation and ended by invoking what "she will become." Though with a backward reference of the musical “Hamilton,” Gorman focused on the present and the possibility of a better future, speaking of a “nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.” But not so Gorman, part of Wednesday’s transfer of power and transfusion of new blood. Twice he asked a pastor to read one of his poems at the Congregational Church in Derry, N.H., because he could not bear to do it himself. As the 1892 valedictorian at Lawrence (Mass.) High School, he ran down the stairs and drenched his face with cold water to fortify himself for speaking. She, like Biden, has a speech impediment. This tale of two poets has a poetry all its own.
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