Theodore Henry Shackelford occupies a modest but telling place in the landscape of early twentieth-century African American poetry, and his brief benedictory lyric "Commencement" offers a compact but richly suggestive window into the sensibility of that moment. Born in 1888 in Windsor, Ontario, Shackelford belonged to a generation of Black writers who came of age between the end of Reconstruction and the first stirrings of the Harlem Renaissance, publishing two collections, Mammy's Cracklin' Bread and Other Poems in 1916 and My Country and Other Poems in 1918, both issued by the modest Press of I. W. Klopp Company rather than by a major metropolitan house. He would later be included, alongside figures such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Georgia Douglas Johnson, in James Weldon Johnson's landmark 1922 anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry, a fact that situates him, however peripherally, within the broader project of establishing a canon of Black verse at the very moment when American letters were beginning, however grudgingly, to acknowledge that such a canon existed. To read "Commencement" against this background is to recognize it not simply as a piece of sentimental occasional verse but as a small artifact of a larger cultural undertaking: the effort, sustained across a century of African American writing, to claim the vocabulary of hope, futurity, and blessing for communities that had been systematically denied access to those very ideas in the public discourse of the nation.

The poem itself belongs to a genre that modern readers may find unfashionable but that carried real social weight in its own time: the poem of occasion, written to be read aloud at a graduation ceremony, printed in a commencement program, or recited by a young person standing before an audience of family and teachers. Commencement exercises in American schools, and especially in the historically Black academies, normal schools, and colleges that proliferated in the decades after Emancipation, were not merely bureaucratic rituals but were charged with an almost sacred significance. For a Black student in the early 1900s to walk across a stage and receive a diploma was to enact, publicly and visibly, a claim to full personhood and civic belonging that the surrounding Jim Crow society was, in countless other contexts, actively working to deny. Booker T. Washington's ideology of self-improvement through education, W. E. B. Du Bois's insistence on the "talented tenth," and the more general ethos of racial "uplift" that animated Black institutional life in this period all converged on the commencement ceremony as a site of profound symbolic importance. Shackelford's poem, with its unclouded optimism and its address to a graduating "you," participates directly in this tradition of using the language of blessing to sanctify a moment that was, in the fullest sense, a political as well as a personal achievement.

What is immediately striking about the poem's technique is its reliance on anaphora, the repeated grammatical opening that stacks image upon image before the syntax finally resolves. The poem builds its vision of the future entirely through a sequence of prepositional phrases beginning with "Of," each one conjuring a fragment of an idealized world: dreams, castles, murmuring streams, fair cities where roses grow, summer clouds where breezes blow. This accumulative structure does real interpretive work. Rather than describing a single, coherent scene, the poem offers a kind of collage of Romantic and pastoral commonplaces, each image only lightly sketched before the poem moves to the next. The effect is dreamlike in the most literal sense, mimicking the associative, half-formed quality of aspiration itself. A graduate standing at the threshold of adulthood does not, after all, possess a single clear picture of the future; rather, that future exists as a shimmer of possible images, castles and cities and gardens, none of them fully realized, all of them glowing with the generalized promise of what is still to come. Shackelford's choice to withhold any single dominant image in favor of this cumulative, almost incantatory listing is a sophisticated way of rendering psychologically true the very experience of standing at a threshold moment.

The imagery itself deserves close attention, because it draws on a reservoir of symbols with deep roots in the Western poetic tradition while also carrying particular resonance for the poem's likely original audience. The castle, as a figure for aspiration, has an ancient pedigree, reaching back through medieval romance and into the fairy tale, and by Shackelford's era it had already become a familiar shorthand for grand, perhaps slightly fantastical, ambition, the "castles in the air" of proverbial speech. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose poem "The Castle-Builder" imagines a child's imaginative towers touching "imaginary skies," offers one well-known precedent for this figure, and Shackelford's use of the same image suggests his immersion in the genteel, Longfellow-inflected poetic culture that dominated American popular verse and schoolroom recitation well into the twentieth century. The murmuring stream and the summer clouds likewise belong to a pastoral vocabulary inherited from English Romanticism, filtered through American schoolbook poetry, in which nature functions as a benign, nurturing backdrop to human feeling. But the phrase "cities fair, where roses grow" introduces something more particular: an urban image softened and domesticated by the presence of the rose, suggesting not the industrial city of early twentieth-century reality, with its tenements and factories, but an idealized city purged of hardship. For a Black readership living through the early years of the Great Migration, as hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved from the rural South toward northern and midwestern cities in search of opportunity and relief from Jim Crow violence, this vision of a city where roses grow rather than one of overcrowding and discrimination carries a quiet, perhaps unconscious, wish-fulfillment. The poem does not name this history directly, and it would be a mistake to over-read a short lyric of this kind as a coded political statement, but the emotional logic of hoping for a city without thorns takes on added poignancy when situated within the lived experience of its likely first audience.

The poem's structure moves, in its final turn, from this cascade of imagery to direct address, as the speaker steps forward to offer the wish explicitly: "And this, the wish I bring to you, / May all your noble dreams come true." This shift from accumulated image to direct benediction is the poem's true center of gravity. Everything that precedes it functions as a kind of extended dependent clause, a build-up of images that only achieves grammatical and emotional completion in the act of blessing. This structural choice reflects a broader pattern in occasional verse, in which the poem exists not as a self-contained aesthetic object but as a social gesture, a gift offered from one person to another at a moment of transition. The word "noble" in the final line is doing significant thematic work: it elevates the graduate's dreams above mere personal ambition, casting them instead as dignified, worthy, even morally weighted aspirations. In a cultural context where Black achievement was so often minimized, mocked, or rendered invisible by the dominant society, the insistence that a young person's dreams are "noble" carries a quiet but unmistakable assertion of worth.

It is worth pausing on the philosophical dimension of this insistence on dreaming as itself a virtue. The poem participates in a long American tradition, stretching from the Puritan sense of providential destiny through Emersonian self-reliance and into the twentieth century, of treating aspiration as a moral good in its own right, almost independent of its object. To dream, in this tradition, is not merely to want something but to exercise a kind of spiritual faculty, and the encouragement to dream "nobly" implies a whole ethics of hope. This connects Shackelford's modest lyric to a much larger and more famous poem published only a few years later, Langston Hughes's "Dreams," with its stark admonition to "hold fast to dreams, / for if dreams die, / life is a broken-winged bird / that cannot fly." Hughes's poem, written by a younger contemporary who would become one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, treats dreaming with a starker, more urgent intensity, aware of the precariousness of hope in a hostile world. Shackelford's poem, gentler and less shadowed, nonetheless shares with Hughes's the conviction that dreams are not incidental but essential to a flourishing life, and read together the two poems illuminate a shared preoccupation among Black poets of this era with reclaiming the language of futurity for a people whose future had so often been foreclosed by others. One might also place "Commencement" alongside Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Beyond the Years," another poem of aspiration and looking forward that circulated in the same literary milieu, or set it against the more famous exhortations of Rudyard Kipling's "If—," whose imperative mode ("If you can keep your head...") offers a sterner, more didactic model of address to a young person on the threshold of adulthood. Shackelford's poem, by contrast, offers no instruction and no conditions; it simply blesses, and in that simplicity lies its particular emotional register, one of unguarded generosity rather than admonishment.

There is, too, a formal modesty to the poem that mirrors its thematic content. Shackelford was not an experimental poet in the manner of his modernist contemporaries; his verse belongs squarely to the genteel, sentimental tradition of American popular poetry, the tradition of parlor recitation, church anniversary programs, and school commencement exercises, in which clarity, sincerity, and accessibility were prized over formal daring. This is not a limitation to be apologized for but a genre convention to be understood on its own terms. The poem was almost certainly written to be read aloud, perhaps by a teacher or a fellow student, to an audience gathered for a specific, local, communal occasion, and its language is calibrated for that context: warm, direct, free of irony or ambiguity, designed to be immediately comprehensible and immediately moving to listeners who might range from small children to elderly grandparents. In this sense the poem's very plainness is a kind of craft, an act of hospitality toward its audience.

The emotional impact of "Commencement," then, derives less from any single striking image or turn of phrase than from the cumulative warmth of its address and the generosity of its final gesture. It captures with real precision the peculiar emotional texture of a graduation day, the mixture of vagueness and intensity that characterizes hope for a future not yet lived, the sense that a young person's dreams are simultaneously fragile, half-formed, and enormously precious. Shackelford, writing from within a community whose access to the American promise of unlimited futurity had been so persistently constrained, offers in this small poem an act of imaginative generosity, extending to the graduate before him the full, unqualified wish that dreams of castles, cities, and gardens might indeed come true. That the poem survives largely as a minor entry in the archive of early Black American verse, overshadowed by the more celebrated achievements of contemporaries like Dunbar and, slightly later, Hughes, should not obscure its value. Read carefully and situated within its historical moment, "Commencement" reveals itself as a quietly moving document of the aspirations, literary and otherwise, that animated Black communal life at the dawn of the twentieth century, and it rewards the same kind of patient, contextual attention that scholars have long extended to more canonical figures in the tradition.

Jessie Pope’s The Call stands as one of the most emblematic—and now controversial—poems of the early phase of the First World War. Written at a time when British society was swept up in patriotic fervor and idealized conceptions of military service, the poem functions simultaneously as a recruitment appeal, a moral exhortation, and a cultural artifact that crystallizes the values, assumptions, and emotional tenor of its moment. Though brief in form, The Call encapsulates a worldview now largely discredited by war’s subsequent horrors, yet its historical significance, rhetorical force, and literary construction merit close scholarly scrutiny. To understand this poem fully is to grapple not only with its surface-level jingoism but also with the complex interplay of gender, duty, national identity, and emotional manipulation that characterized much of the propaganda of its era.

At the core of The Call lies a direct, almost theatrical address: a series of questions posed to an imagined young man—“my laddie”—designed to elicit a response that is as much emotional as it is volitional. The poem’s speaker, implicitly female, adopts a tone that is both coaxing and accusing, blending maternal affection with peer-like camaraderie. This dual voice is not incidental; it reflects the gendered dynamics of wartime mobilization, wherein women were often cast as both guardians of domestic virtue and enforcers of masculine honor. The repeated invocation of “my laddie” personalizes the call to arms, transforming what might otherwise be an abstract civic duty into an intimate challenge. It is not the state or the military that summons the young man—it is a familiar, affectionate voice that implies betrayal if he refuses.

Historically, The Call emerged in 1914–15, during the early, euphoric phase of the Great War, when enlistment was still voluntary in Britain and public discourse was saturated with rhetoric of adventure, glory, and moral righteousness. The poem first appeared in newspapers and later in Pope’s collection The Call: and Other Poems (1915), which became immensely popular among the British reading public. At the time, Pope was a well-established journalist and poet known for her light verse and children’s poetry, and her wartime poems, including The Call, were widely reprinted and recited. Her work resonated because it distilled complex national anxieties and aspirations into accessible, emotionally charged language that spoke directly to the middle-class sensibilities of the era.

Culturally, the poem draws on deep-seated Victorian and Edwardian notions of heroism, masculinity, and imperial duty. The references to “the Empire’s thanks” and “the victor’s ranks” situate the conflict not merely as a defensive war but as a noble crusade to uphold British global supremacy. This imperial framing was critical to the war’s early appeal, particularly among the educated classes who saw service as both a patriotic obligation and a means of affirming Britain’s civilizational mission. The poem’s invocation of “banners and rolling drums” evokes a triumphant return—a procession that celebrates not just victory but moral superiority. In this vision, war is not chaos but ceremony; not slaughter but spectacle. The defeated or hesitant man, by contrast, is reduced to the grotesque image of one who “stand[s] and bite[s] his thumbs”—a gesture of impotent shame, borrowed perhaps from Shakespearean idiom but here recast as the ultimate social disgrace.

Pope’s deployment of rhetorical questions is perhaps the poem’s most potent literary device. Rather than stating outright what the young man should do, she forces him—and by extension, the reader—into a position of self-interrogation. Each stanza presents a binary: action versus inaction, courage versus cowardice, participation versus exclusion. The questions are not neutral; they are loaded with moral implication. To “fret to begin” is virtuous; to “want to save his skin” is suspect. To “long to charge and shoot” is healthy ambition; to “rather wait a bit” is weakness. The cumulative effect is a kind of emotional blackmail, where refusal to enlist is framed not as a reasoned choice but as a failure of character. This technique exploits the psychological vulnerability of youth, especially young men raised in a culture that equated masculinity with physical bravery and public service.

It is worth noting that the poem’s emotional impact hinges on its use of colloquial diction and rhythmic urgency. Phrases like “keen on getting fit” and “show his grit” reflect the everyday language of schoolboy ethos and sporting culture, thereby aligning military service with familiar, socially approved activities. The informal register—“my laddie,” “Do you?”—creates a sense of camaraderie, as though the speaker is merely reminding the young man of values he already holds. This rhetorical strategy blurs the line between persuasion and peer pressure, between civic appeal and social coercion. The poem does not invite debate; it forecloses it by presenting enlistment as the only morally and socially acceptable response.

In contrast to the later war poets—most notably Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg—Pope offers no glimpse of mud, blood, or psychological trauma. There is no trench warfare in The Call, only the romantic abstraction of “the trench” as a site of honor. The absence of realism is not a failure of imagination but a reflection of cultural timing and intent. Pope wrote before the full horror of industrialized warfare became widely known, and her audience had not yet been disillusioned by reports of stalemate, mass casualties, and bureaucratic incompetence. To judge her poem solely by the standards of post-1916 poetry would be to misunderstand its function and context. The Call belongs to a specific historical moment—one of collective optimism and moral certainty—that would soon be shattered by the Somme and Passchendaele.

Indeed, the poem’s later infamy stems largely from its juxtaposition with the anti-war verse that followed. Owen’s famous poem Dulce et Decorum Est, written partly as a rebuke to “my friend” (widely interpreted as a reference to Jessie Pope), explicitly counters the romantic illusions that poems like The Call helped propagate. Where Pope speaks of “banners and rolling drums,” Owen describes “blood-shod” soldiers “coughing like hags.” Where Pope frames war as a test of character, Owen reveals it as a dehumanizing machine that grinds men to dust. The contrast is stark and deliberate, and it has shaped much of the modern reception of Pope’s work. Yet this binary reading—jingoist versus truth-teller—risks oversimplification. Pope was not a cynical manipulator but a product of her time, writing what her culture demanded and believed. Her poem must be understood not as a lie but as a symptom—a cultural expression of a society not yet ready to confront the reality of modern war.

Biographically, Pope’s life and career complicate the caricature of her as a mere propagandist. Though she is now best remembered for The Call and similar poems, she was a prolific writer whose work spanned journalism, children’s literature, and light verse. She supported the war effort wholeheartedly, as did many women of her class and generation, but she also later advocated for veterans and wrote sympathetically about the war’s impact on families. Her later work shows a more nuanced understanding of loss and sacrifice, even if it never approached the searing honesty of Owen or Sassoon. To dismiss her entirely is to ignore the broader cultural matrix in which wartime poetry operated—a matrix that included both celebratory and critical voices, often coexisting in tension.

Philosophically, The Call raises enduring questions about the ethics of persuasion in times of national crisis. Is it ever justifiable to appeal to shame, peer pressure, and social conformity to recruit soldiers? Does patriotic poetry have a responsibility to truth, or is its function purely motivational? These questions remain relevant in contemporary discourse about media, propaganda, and the moral economy of war. Pope’s poem, for all its simplicity, engages with these issues implicitly by framing enlistment as a moral imperative rather than a political choice. The “laddie” is not asked to weigh strategic considerations or ethical dilemmas; he is asked whether he is the kind of man who acts—or watches. In this framework, neutrality is not an option; it is a failure of identity.

Moreover, the poem’s emotional resonance—however problematic by modern standards—cannot be denied. It speaks to a deep human desire to belong, to be recognized, to prove oneself worthy of admiration. These impulses are not unique to wartime; they are fundamental to the construction of selfhood in any society. Pope taps into them with remarkable efficiency, using poetic form not to explore ambiguity but to resolve it in favor of action. The poem’s power lies not in its complexity but in its clarity: it offers a single, unambiguous path to honor, and any deviation from that path is marked as shameful. In a world increasingly aware of moral gray areas, such certainty can be both seductive and dangerous.

It is also instructive to place The Call within the broader tradition of martial poetry. From the epics of Homer and Virgil to the ballads of the Napoleonic Wars, poets have long glorified combat as a crucible of virtue. Pope’s poem fits squarely within this lineage, albeit in a modern, mass-media context. What distinguishes her work is its domestic intimacy—the sense that war is not a distant affair of kings and generals but a personal test for every young man. This democratization of heroism was characteristic of early twentieth-century nationalism, which sought to mobilize entire populations rather than just professional armies. In this light, The Call can be seen as part of a larger cultural project to redefine citizenship in martial terms.

Yet even within its own historical moment, the poem was not universally embraced. Critics at the time noted its simplistic morality, and some soldiers reportedly resented the implication that they had gone to war for glory rather than duty or necessity. The poem’s tone—breezy, almost playful—struck many as incongruous with the gravity of war. This dissonance reveals a key tension in early wartime culture: the gap between the rhetoric of sacrifice and the reality of suffering. Pope’s poem attempts to bridge that gap by making sacrifice seem exhilarating and socially rewarding, but the attempt relies on a suspension of disbelief that the war itself would soon shatter.

In conclusion, The Call by Jessie Pope is far more than a relic of misguided patriotism. It is a finely tuned instrument of emotional persuasion, a cultural snapshot of a society on the brink of disillusionment, and a testament to the power—and peril—of poetic rhetoric in times of crisis. Its themes of honor, duty, shame, and belonging continue to resonate, even as its assumptions have been overturned by history. To read it today is to engage with a vanished world of moral certainty, one that believed in the redemptive power of war and the clarity of masculine virtue. The poem’s enduring value lies not in its truth but in its honesty about the illusions that animate nations in the early throes of conflict. In studying The Call, we do not merely confront a piece of propaganda; we confront the mechanisms by which societies summon their young to die—and the voices that, for better or worse, make such summons seem noble. Poetry, at its most potent, does not just reflect culture; it shapes it. And in 1915, few poems shaped British wartime culture more decisively than this deceptively simple call to arms.