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Rendezvous With Death
By peace | July 23, 2007
I have a Rendezvous With Death
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade
When Spring comes round with rustling shade
And apple blossoms fill the air.
I have a rendezvous with Death
While Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath;
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow flowers appear.
God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear…
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming down,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
Alan Seeger (Born 22 June 1888; Died 4 July 1916)
Alan Seeger was a soldier and famous World War I poet who died during World War One.
Alan Seeger attended Staten Island Academy and lived on the then rural Staten Island with his parents, sister Elizabeth, and brother Charles.
In 1906, Seeger entered Harvard where he studied alongside fellow writers including T.S. Eliot. Critics are quick to point out that Seeger’s taste and talents in poetry were quite different from other poets of the time. Seeger maintained his youthful romanticism and passion, which reflects the idealism of that era and comes through in his poetry. While at Harvard, Seeger helped edit the “Harvard Monthly,” where he published many of his poems.
Seeger spent two years in the French Foreign Legion; as an American citizen he could not join the French military, so he did the next best thing and joined the Legion, since the United States had not yet entered the war against the Central Powers.
After graduating from Harvard in 1910, Seeger lived for two years in Greenwich Village where he wrote poetry and enjoyed the life of a young bohemian. The poetry he wrote then and while he was at the front was not published until 1917, a year after his death. Poems was not a successful work, due perhaps, according to Eric Homberger, to its lofty idealism and language, qualities out of fashion in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Topics: Poems, View All Post |
