The following op-ed will appear in a print edition of The Crimson the week of June 2.

“Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,/And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,/With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,/To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping.”

So begins Rupert Brooke’s 1914 sonnet “Peace,” an expression of the Englishman’s wondering exultation at being presented with a worthy task—war service—after years of depression and dead-end soul-searching. Of course, Brooke died of septicemia en route to Gallipoli, and thus never had a chance to revise his opinions of war after experiencing the realities of modern combat. The sonnets of his acclaimed “1914” sequence were eventually discredited as hopelessly naïve and militaristic. But still, I can think of no better or more sincere expression of the energy and motivation that attends the confrontation of a worthy task that demands one’s devotion.

If it seems like getting to that last point by way of a largely forgotten 100-year-old sonnet is counterintuitive, bear with me, because it’s completely appropriate. Before this year began, I had no idea that I would be preparing to put myself before a class of middle schoolers and try to teach them math, of all things. As a person who stutters, the idea of teaching younger students was something that had never occurred to me, something that I would have said was simply beyond me. I went through Harvard with vague ideas of graduate school (while trying not to think about what speaking in front of a college class would do to me), hoping something would fall into my lap that would answer all my questions.

To my surprise, something did. Some of us can forge ahead on instinct or gumption, while some of us—Rupert and I included—need a kickstart in the right direction to get going. When I really thought about doing Teach For America (TFA), I began to wonder how I could do anything else. After a life of excellent education, of incredibly loving and supportive family members, of the best friends anyone could ask for, after four years of Harvard—with its ancient historical duty to its country and its world to send its graduates into service wherever they are needed—how could I turn down the opportunity to spend two years working at something obviously worthwhile?

Truthfully, it shouldn’t have taken something as convenient as a well-publicized and well-marketed program like TFA, which works at something as obviously problematic as educational inequity, to catch my youth and waken me from sleeping. Throughout college, despite the clear proscriptions of my faith and my conscience, I was often distracted by vague daydreams of wealth and status. It took the clear presentation of an important need to get me going.

And now that I have, my former fears recede into unimportance. Worrying about my stutter seems embarrassingly vain when balanced against the task before me; leaping into cleanness and beginning the next two years means sloughing off the weary distractions that might keep me from serving my future students most effectively. Like Brooke, I’m energized and motivated by the thought of my work before me. It is not a manic energy, but a steady welling that unfolds like the 14 lines of sonnet, assuring me that I can because I must.

This should not be taken as a snide attack on any of my classmates. Harvard has, and should continue, to provide leaders in every sector of private and public life, as long as they aren’t wandering as I was, without a clear purpose and susceptible to distractions. Conscious of what we have been given, of the status afforded our university and of what is expected of us, we should all be working at whatever we do with sure hand, clear eye and sharpened power toward a more just and equitable society. The “hour” is now, waiting for us to match ourselves to it.

M. Aidan Kelly ’08, a former Crimson magazine chair, is a History and Literature concentrator in Cabot House.