Poems

Part 1

Produced by Alan Light

Poems

Alan Seeger

With an introduction by William Archer

Contents

Introduction by William Archer

Juvenilia

An Ode to Natural Beauty The Deserted Garden The Torture of Cuauhtemoc The Nympholept The Wanderer The Need to Love El Extraviado La Nue All That's Not Love . . . Paris The Sultan's Palace Fragments

Thirty Sonnets: Sonnet I Sonnet II Sonnet III Sonnet IV Sonnet V Sonnet VI Sonnet VII Sonnet VIII Sonnet IX Sonnet X Sonnet XI Sonnet XII Sonnet XIII Sonnet XIV Sonnet XV Sonnet XVI Kyrenaikos Antinous Vivien I Loved . . . Virginibus Puerisque . . . With a Copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets on Leaving College Written in a Volume of the Comtesse de Noailles Coucy Tezcotzinco The Old Lowe House, Staten Island Oneata On the Cliffs, Newport To England at the Outbreak of the Balkan War At the Tomb of Napoleon Before the Elections in America--November, 1912

The Rendezvous Do You Remember Once . . . The Bayadere Eudaemon Broceliande Lyonesse Tithonus An Ode to Antares

Translations

Dante. Inferno, Canto XXVI Ariosto. Orlando Furioso, Canto X, 91-99 On a Theme in the Greek Anthology After an Epigram of Clement Marot

Last Poems

The Aisne (1914-15) Champagne (1914-15) The Hosts Maktoob I Have a Rendezvous with Death . . .

Sonnets: - Sonnet I - - Sonnet II - - Sonnet III - - Sonnet IV - - Sonnet V - - Sonnet VI - - Sonnet VII - - Sonnet VIII - - Sonnet IX - - Sonnet X - - Sonnet XI - - Sonnet XII -

Bellinglise Liebestod Resurgam A Message to America Introduction and Conclusion of a Long Poem Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France

Introduction by William Archer

This book contains the undesigned, but all the more spontaneous and authentic, biography of a very rare spirit. It contains the record of a short life, into which was crowded far more of keen experience and high aspiration--of the thrill of sense and the rapture of soul--than it is given to most men, even of high vitality, to extract from a life of twice the length. Alan Seeger had barely passed his twenty-eighth birthday, when, charging up to the German trenches on the field of Belloy-en-Santerre, his "escouade" of the Foreign Legion was caught in a deadly flurry of machine-gun fire, and he fell, with most of his comrades, on the blood-stained but reconquered soil. To his friends the loss was grievous, to literature it was--we shall never know how great, but assuredly not small. Yet this was a case, if ever there was one, in which we may not only say "Nothing is here for tears," but may add to the well-worn phrase its less familiar sequel:

Nothing to wail Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise, or blame,--nothing but well and fair, And what may quiet us in a death so noble.

Of all the poets who have died young, none has died so happily. Without suggesting any parity of stature, one cannot but think of the group of English poets who, about a hundred years ago, were cut off in the flower of their age. Keats, coughing out his soul by the Spanish Steps; Shelley's spirit of flame snuffed out by a chance capful of wind from the hills of Carrara; Byron, stung by a fever-gnat on the very threshold of his great adventure--for all these we can feel nothing but poignant unrelieved regret. Alan Seeger, on the other hand, we can very truly envy. Youth had given him all that it had to give; and though he would fain have lived on--though no one was ever less world-weary than he--yet in the plenitude of his exultant strength, with eye undimmed and pulse unslackening, he met the death he had voluntarily challenged, in the cause of the land he loved, and in the moment of victory. Again and again, both in prose and in verse, he had said that this seemed to him a good death to die; and two years of unflinching endurance of self-imposed hardship and danger had proved that he meant what he said.

I do not, I repeat, pretend to measure him with Shelley, Byron or Keats, though I think none of them would have disdained his gift of song. But assuredly he is of their fellowship in virtue, not only of his early death, but of his whole-hearted devotion to the spirit of Romance, as they understood it. From his boyhood upward, his one passion was for beauty; and it was in the guise of Romance that beauty revealed itself to him. He was from the first determined not only to write but to live Romance, and when fate threw in his way a world-historic opportunity, he seized it with delight. He knew that he was dicing with Death, but that was the very essence of his ideal; and he knew that if Death won the throw, his ideal was crowned and consummated, for ever safe from the withering touch of time, or accidental soilure. If it had been given to Swinburne to fall, rifle in hand, on, say, the field of Mentana, we should have been the poorer by many splendid verses, but the richer by a heroic life-story. And would his lot have been the less enviable? Nay, surely, much the more. That is the thought which may well bring solace to those who loved Alan Seeger, and who may at first have felt as an unmixed cruelty the cutting short of so eager, so generous, so gallant a life.

The description "Juvenilia" attached to the first series of these poems is of his own choosing. It is for the reader to judge what allowance is to be made for unripeness, whether of substance or of form. Criticism is none of my present business. But I think no discerning reader can fail to be impressed by one great virtue pervading all the poet's work--its absolute sincerity. There is no pose, no affectation of any sort. There are marks of the loving study of other poets, and these the best. We are frequently reminded of this singer and of that. The young American is instinctively loyal to the long tradition of English literature. He is content to undergo the influence of the great masters, and does not seek for premature originality on the by-paths of eccentricity. But while he is the disciple of many, he is the vassal of none. His matter is always his own, the fruit of personal vision, experience, imagination, even if he may now and then unconsciously pour it into a mould provided by another. He is no mere echo of the rhythms of this poet, or mimic of that other's attitude and outlook. The great zest of living which inspires him is far too real and intense to clothe itself in the trappings of any alien individuality. He is too straightforward to be even dramatic. It is not his instinct to put on a mask, even for purposes of artistic personation, and much less of affectation.

If ever there was a being who said "Yea" to life, accepted it as a glorious gift, and was determined to live it with all his might, it was Alan Seeger. Such a frame of mind is too instinctive and temperamental to be called optimism. It is not the result of a balancing of good and ill, and a reasoned decision that good preponderates. Rather it is a direct perception, an intuition, of the beauty and wonder of the universe--an intuition too overpowering to be seriously disturbed by the existence of pain and evil, some of which, at any rate, has its value as a foil, a background, to joy. This was the message--not a philosophy but an irresistible emotion--which he sought to deliver through the medium of an art which he seriously studied and deeply loved. It spoke from the very depths of his being, and the poems in which it found utterance, whatever their purely literary qualities, have at least the value of a first-hand human document, the sincere self-portraiture of a vivid and virile soul.

There are three more or less clearly-marked elements in a poet's equipment--observation, passion, reflection, or in simpler terms, seeing, feeling and thinking. The first two are richly represented in the following poems, the third, as was natural, much less so. The poet was too fully occupied in garnering impressions and experiences to think of co-ordinating and interpreting them. That would have come later; and later, too, would have come a general deepening of the spiritual content of his work. There had been nothing in either his outward or his inward life that could fairly be called suffering or struggle. He had not sounded the depths of human experience, which is as much as to say that neither had he risen to the heights. This he no doubt recognised himself, and was not thinking merely of the date of composition when he called his pre-war poems "Juvenilia". Great emotions, and perhaps great sorrows, would have come to him in due time, and would have deepened and enriched his vein of song. The first great emotion which found him, when he rallied to the trumpet-call of France and freedom, did, as a matter of fact, lend new reality and poignancy to his verse; but the soldier's life left him small leisure for composition. We must regard his work, then, as a fragment, a mere foretaste of what he might have achieved had his life been prolonged. But, devoted though he was to his art, he felt that to live greatly is better than to write greatly. The unfulfilment of his poetic hopes and dreams meant the fulfilment of a higher ambition.

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