Since he was growing up in the 1890s and 1900s, Eliot's first verses were naturally in the late romantic vein. Yet even the ‘poems written in early youth’ – that is, from his last year at Smith Academy when he was sixteen, to the end of his undergraduate years at Harvard when he was twenty-one – reveal the individual talent that was soon to cure itself of romanticism.

The half-dozen lyrics written before he discovered Laforgue, with ‘At Graduation 1905’, faintly evoke the poetical effects of Gray, of Blake's Poetical Sketches, of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, of Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne, and of Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyám. The diction is drawn from these poets, and is undisturbed by the young author's own direct sensations. This makes the verse not impersonal but remote and artificial, its images not original but reproductions. In spite of that there is some distinctive character. The many borrowed voices are composed into one voice; and that voice thinks through the conventional images with a rare cogency. If the flowers are forever withering, at least they do so to some definite effect.

The two versions of the earliest lyric, after Jonson, attempt a metaphysical variation upon the carpe diem theme: but the dissolution of what is transient into the timeless ‘divine’ is hardly effective. However, ‘When we came home across the hill’ does transform the apparently idyllic into the elegiac.