Alan Seeger

“ Alan Seeger was romantic. So are most boys. But with most boys, romance goes no further than books and dreams. "Robinson Crusoe," "Huckleberry Finn," "Treasure Island," and other tales of adventure and of foreign lands are all the romance that many know. But, like Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger had the opportunity to live romance, as he always declared he would do. He found it in his life as a boy in Mexico, as a young man in Paris, and in the Foreign Legion of the French army. The Foreign Legion was made up of foreigners in France who volunteered to fight with the French army. ”

“ 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.
Alan Seeger was born in New York on June 22nd, 1888.
His father and his mother belonged to old New England families.
When he was a year old his parents removed to Staten Island, which forms, as it were, the stopper to the bottle of New York harbour. There he remained until his tenth year, growing up along with a brother and a sister, the one a little older, the other a little younger, than himself. ”

“ More delicate than sprays of maiden fern,
⁠Streak with pale rose the peacock-breasted sky,
Then blanch. As water-lilies fold at night,
Sank back into themselves those plumes of fervid light.
And they would watch the first faint stars appear,
⁠The blue East blend with the blue hills below,
As lovers when their shuddering bliss draws near
⁠Into one pulse of fluid rapture grow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The first poet and author in the American army to give up his life for the cause of freedom was Joyce Kilmer. Like Alan Seeger, another American poet who fell fighting in the Foreign Legion of France, Joyce Kilmer greatly loved life. He loved the flowers and birds and trees. Probably his finest poem is one which he wrote about trees. He loved the people around him, impatient only with those who did not love and make the most of the life that God had given them. ”

“ The quest of beauty is scarcely a profession, and it caused his parents some concern to find him pausing irresolute on the threshold of manhood, instead of setting himself a goal and bracing his energies for its achievement. In 1911 his mother and sister left Mexico, a week or two before Porfirio Diaz made his exit, and the Maderists entered the capital. They returned to New York, to find Alan still unsettled, and possessed with the thought, or perhaps rather the instinct, that the life he craved for was not to be found in America, but awaited him in Europe. ”

“ They can look, for they know that it floats there still
By the might of their hands and the strength of their will,
And through perils countless and trials unknown
Its honor each man has made his own. ”

“ The family removed to Mexico, and there Alan spent a great part of the most impressionable years of his youth. If New York embodies the romance of Power, Mexico represents to perfection the romance of Picturesqueness. To pass from the United States to Mexico is like passing at one bound from the New World to the Old. Wherever it has not been recently Americanized, its beauty is that of sunbaked, somnolent decay. ”

“ We have been engaged in the hardest kind of hard work—two weeks of beautiful autumn weather on the whole, frosty nights and sunny days and beautiful coloring on the sparse foliage that breaks here and there the wide rolling expanses of open country. ”

“ Slowly the mystery that it shrouds resolves as the grey light steals over the eastern hills. Like a photograph in the washing, its high lights and shadows come gradually forth. The light splash in the foreground becomes a ruined chateau, the grey street a demolished village. ”

“ Swells into bloom and spreads sweet charms abroad
Unworshipped of my love. I cannot see
In Life's profusion and passionate brevity
How hearts enamored of life can strain too much
In one long tension to hear, to see, to touch. ”

“ Heads high and hearts aflame and bayonets bare.
And we shall brave eternity as though
Eyes looked on us in which we would seem fair—
One waited in whose presence we would wear,
Even as a lover who would be well-seen,
Our manhood faultless and our honor clean. ”

“ The little studio in the candle-glare,
And all that makes in word and touch and glance
The bliss of the first nights of a romance
When will to love and be beloved casts out
The want to question or the will to doubt. ”

“ Standing with arms out-stretched and flower-like face.
And, sick with all those centuries of tears
Shed in the penance for factitious woe,
Once more I saw the nations at her feet,
For Love shone in their eyes, and in their ears
Come unto me, Love beckoned them, for lo!
The breast your lips abjured is still as sweet. ”

“ And like green isles, sun-kissed, with sweet perfume
Loading the airs blown back from that dim gulf,
Gleamed only through the all-involving haze
The hours when we have loved and been beloved.
⁠Therefore, sweet friends, as often as by Love
You rise absorbed into the harmony
Of planets singing round magnetic suns,
Let not propriety nor prejudice
Nor the precepts of jealous age deny
What Sense so incontestably affirms ”

“ Fades in pale dust and vaporous distances,
Stained with far fumes the light grows less and less
And the sky reddens round the day's retreat.
Now out of orient chambers, cool and sweet,
Like Nature's pure lustration, Dusk comes down. ”

“ Filling a little pond's untroubled glass,
Its antique towers and mouldering masonry.
Oh, should I fall to-morrow, lay me here,
That o'er my tomb, with each reviving year,
Wood-flowers may blossom and the wood-doves croon ”

“ The fair world glistens, and in after days
The memory of kind lips and laughing eyes
Lives in my step and lightens all my face,—
So they who found the Earthly Paradise
Still breathed, returned, of that sweet, joyful place. ”

“ When from warm showers the pearly shades disband
And sunset opens o'er the humid land,
Shows thy veiled immanence in orient skies, —
Long as pale mist and opalescent dyes
Hung on far isle or vanishing mountain-crest,
Fields of remote enchantment can suggest
So sweet to wander in it matters nought,
They hold no place but in impassioned thought,
Long as one draught from a clear sky may be
A scented luxury ”

“ Home turning as a conqueror turns home,
What time green dawn down every street uprears
Arches of triumph! He has drained as well
Joy's perfumed bowl and cried as I have cried:
Be Fame their mistress whom Love passes by. ”

“ Broceliande! in the perilous beauty of silence and menacing shade,
Thou art set on the shores of the sea down the haze of horizons untraveiled, unscanned.
Untroubled, untouched with the woes of this world are the moon-marshalled hosts that invade
⁠Broceliande.
Only at dusk, when lavender clouds in the orient twilight disband,
Vanishing where all the blue afternoon they have drifted in solemn parade,
Sometimes a whisper comes down on the wind from the valleys of Fairyland ”

“ I yearned for passionate Love; faint gauzes fell away.
⁠Pillowed in rosy light I found my heart's desire.
Over the silks and down her florid beauty lay,
⁠As over orient clouds the sunset's coral fire. ”

“ The sunny Venice of the western world;
There many corpses, rotting in the wind,
Poked up stiff limbs, but in the leprous rags
No jewel caught the sun, no tawny chain
Gleamed, as the prying halberds raked them o'er. ”

“ Gifted to rule. Against the world's great man
Lift their low calumny and sneering cries
The Pharisaïc multitude, the host
Of piddling slanderers whose little eyes
Know not what greatness is and never can. ”

“ And coast-towns where the vultures back and forth
Sail in the clear depths of the tropic sky,
And swallows in the sunset where they fly
Over gray Gothic cities in the north,
And the wine-cellar and the chorus there,
The dance-hall and a face among the crowd,—
Were all delights that made him sing aloud
For joy to sojourn in a world so fair. ”

“ AN ODE TO NATURAL BEAUTY
There is a power whose inspiration fills
Nature's fair fabric, sun- and star-inwrought,
Like airy dew ere any drop distils,
Like perfume in the laden flower, like aught
Unseen which interfused throughout the whole
Becomes its quickening pulse and principle and soul. ”

“ Who one bright dawn, when each remotest hill
Stood sharp and clear in Heaven's unclouded blue
And all Earth shimmered with fresh-beaded dew,
Risen in the first beams of the gladdening sun,
Walked up into the mountains. ”

“ Times change. Man's fortune prospers, or it falls.
Change harbors not in those eternal halls
And tranquil chamber where Tithonus lies.
But through his window there the eastern skies
Fall palely fair to the dim ocean's end.
There, in blue mist where air and ocean blend,
The lazy clouds that sail the wide world o'er
Falter and turn where they can sail no more. ”

“ In the glad revels, in the happy fêtes,
⁠When cheeks are flushed, and glasses gilt and pearled
With the sweet wine of France that concentrates
⁠The sunshine and the beauty of the world,
Drink sometimes, you whose footsteps yet may tread
⁠The undisturbed, delightful paths of Earth,
To those whose blood, in pious duty shed,
⁠Hallows the soil where that same wine had birth. ”

“ Fierce exhalations of hot human love,—
Around her beauty valuable above
The sunny outspread kingdoms of the world;
Flowing as ever like a dancing fire
Flowed her belled ankles and bejewelled wrists,
Around her beauty swept like sanguine mists
The nimbus of a thousand hearts' desire. ”

“ And eyes incensed with love for all they see,
A wonder more to be adored than wooed,
On whom the grace of conscious womanhood
Adorning every little thing she does
Sits like enchantment, making glorious
A careless pose, a casual attitude;
Around her lovely shoulders mantle-wise
Hath come the realm of those old fabulous queens
Whose storied loves are Art's rich heritage,
To keep alive in this our latter age
That force that moving through sweet Beauty's means
Lifts up Man's soul to towering enterprise. ”

“ And with no less a sense of moving in harmony with a universe where masses are in continual conflict and new combinations are engendered out of eternal collisions, he shoulders arms and marches forth with haste. ”

“ From their home on the heights of Staten Island, the children looked out day by day upon one of the most romantic scenes in the world—the gateway to the Western Hemisphere. They could see the great steamships of all the nations threading their way through the Narrows and passing in procession up the glorious expanse of New York Bay, to which the incessant local traffic of tug-boats, river steamers and huge steam-ferries lent an ever-shifting animation. ”

“ And dearth in Nature of sweet Beauty's rose
That oft as Fortune from ten thousand shows
One from the train of Love's true courtiers
Straightway on him who gazes, unawares,
Deep wonder seizes and swift trembling grows,
Reft by that sight of purpose and repose,
Hardly its weight his fainting breast upbears.
Then on the soul from some ancestral place
Floods back remembrance of its heavenly birth,
When, in the light of that serener sphere,
It saw ideal beauty face to face
That through the forms of this our meaner Earth
Shines with a beam less steadfast and less clear. ”

“ The winter constellations blazing forth —
Perseus, the Twins, Orion, the Great Bear —
Gleamed on our bayonets pointing to the north.
And the lone sentinel would start and soar
On wings of strong emotion as he knew
That kinship with the stars that only War
Is great enough to lift man's spirit to. ”

“ Who only coveted what grove and field
And sunshine and green Earth and tender arms could yield—
A nympholept, through pleasant days and drear
⁠Seeking his faultless adolescent dream,
A pilgrim down the paths that disappear
⁠In mist and rainbows on the world's extreme,
A helpless voyager who all too near
⁠The mouth of Life's fair flower-bordered stream,
Clutched at Love's single respite in his need
More than the drowning swimmer clutches at a reed ”

“ But taking some white proffered hand that from Earth's barren every day
Can lead you by the shortest way into Love's florid fairyland.
And that divine enchanted life that lurks under Life's common guise—
That city of romance that lies within the City's toil and strife—
Shall, knocking, open to your hands, for Love is all its golden key,
And one's name murmured tenderly the only magic it demands. ”

“ What is Success? Out of the endless ore
Of deep desire to coin the utmost gold
Of passionate memory; to have lived so well
That the fifth moon, when it swims up once more
Through orchard boughs where mating orioles build
And apple flowers unfold,
Find not of that dear need that all things tell
The heart unburdened nor the arms unfilled. ”

“ The gold all color and grace are folded o'er,
⁠The warmth all beauty and tenderness embower,—
Thou quiverest at Nature's perfumed core,
⁠The pistil of a myriad-petalled flower.
Round thee revolves, inimitably wide,
⁠The world's desire, as stars around their pole.
Round thee all earthly loveliness beside
⁠Is but the radiate, infinite aureole.
Thou art the poem on the cosmic page—
⁠In rubric written on its golden ground—
That Nature paints her flowers and foliage
⁠And rich-illumined commentary round. ”