"If you're a poet compelled to write a poem for a particular occasion, your muse might well freeze up. Almost a century ago, for example, at Charter Day, 1897, Thomas W. Higginson hailed the College in a poem that included a pleasing tribute (couched in a clever metaphor) from Harvard to William & Mary as "Thou earliest College of our native land/ The first conceived, yet not the earliest born!" But Higginson's poem is flaccid, done in by the bombast characteristic of the genre..."