Rhetorical Analysis of Rita Dove's Commencement Address

I am extremely delighted to be here today, at the very institution where I have been teaching for the past twenty-seven years. Although I have given commencement speeches before, this one is different; this is personal.

The job of a commencement speaker—I googled it, so it must be true!—is to dispense 'life advice.' That seems the very opposite of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s definition of the poet as 'a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.' So I will not give you advice. The last thing you want to hear is advice—because in order to be effective, advice must be specific—and that, obviously, is impossible in this setting.

I wish you Hunger. Of course, I don’t mean physiological want, but a continued spiritual and intellectual appetite, a hunger to know more, do more, feel more.

I wish you Hard Work. By that I don’t mean back-breaking labor, not the drudgery of the treadmill, but an appreciation for the work that comes before the big show—getting ready, honing your tools.

I wish you Uncertainty. There’s only so much knowledge that can be taught; hard facts are just that—solid, dense entities, the stones in a swiftly flowing stream of possibilities.