Poems
by
Alan Seeger
Part 1 out of 3
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placed in single quotes, or otherwise marked as needed.
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[Alan Seeger, American (New York) Poet. 22 June 1888 - 04 July 1916.]
Poems
by 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.
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. 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. In the foreground lay Robbins Reef Lighthouse,
in the middle distance the Statue of Liberty, in the background
the giant curves of Brooklyn Bridge, and, range over range,
the mountainous buildings of "down town" New York -- not then as colossal
as they are to-day, but already unlike anything else under the sun.
And the incoming stream of tramps and liners met the outgoing stream
which carried the imagination seaward, to the islands of the buccaneers,
and the haunts of all the heroes and villains of history, in the Old World.
The children did not look with incurious eyes upon this stirring scene.
They knew the names of all the great European liners and of the warships
passing to and from the Navy Yard; and the walls of their nursery
were covered with their drawings of the shipping, rude enough, no doubt,
but showing accurate observation of such details as funnels,
masts and rigging. They were of an age, before they left Staten Island,
to realize something of the historic implications of their environment.
In 1898 the family returned to New York, and there Alan continued
at the Horace Mann School the education begun at the Staten Island Academy.
The great delight of the ten-year-old schoolboy was to follow
the rushing fire-engines which were an almost daily feature
in the life of the New York streets. Even in manhood he could never resist
the lure of the fire-alarm.
Two years later (1900) came a new migration, which no doubt exercised
a determining influence on the boy's development. 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. It is in many ways
curiously like its mother -- or rather its step-mother -- country, Spain.
But Spain can show nothing to equal the spacious magnificence of its scenery
or the picturesqueness of its physiognomies and its costumes.
And then it is the scene of the most fascinating adventure
recorded in history -- an exploit which puts to shame
the imagination of the greatest masters of romance.
It is true that the Mexico City of to-day shows scanty traces
(except in its Museum) of the Tenochtitlan of Montezuma;
but the vast amphitheatre on which it stands is still wonderfully impressive,
and still the great silver cones of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl
look down upon it from their immaculate altitudes.
Though well within the tropics, the great elevation of the city (7400 feet)
renders its climate very attractive to those for whom height has no terrors;
and the Seegers soon became greatly attached to it.
For two very happy years, it was the home of the whole family.
The children had a tutor whom they respected and loved,
and who helped to develop their taste for poetry and good literature.
"One of our keenest pleasures," writes one of the family, "was to go in a body
to the old book-shops, and on Sunday morning to the `Thieves Market',
to rummage for treasures; and many were the Elzevirs and worm-eaten,
vellum-bound volumes from the old convent libraries that fell into our hands.
At that time we issued a home magazine called `The Prophet',
in honour of a large painting that we had acquired and chose to consider
as the patron of our household. The magazine was supposed to appear monthly,
but was always months behind its time. Alan was the sporting editor,
but his literary ability had even then begun to appear,
and he overstepped his department with contributions of poetry
and lengthy essays. No copies of this famous periodical are extant:
they all went down in the wreck of the `Merida'."
In the chilly days of winter, frequent visits were paid
to the lower levels of the `tierra templada', especially to Cuernavaca,
one of the "show" places of the country. The children learned to ride
and to cycle, and were thus able to extend their excursions on all sides.
When, after two years, they went back to the United States to school,
they were already familiar with Mexican nature and life;
and they kept their impressions fresh by frequent vacation visits.
It must have been a delightful experience to slip down every now and then
to the tropics: first to pass under the pink walls of Morro Castle
into the wide lagoon of Havana; then to cross the Spanish Main to Vera Cruz;
then, after skirting the giant escarpment of Orizaba,
to crawl zigzagging up the almost precipitous ascent
that divides the `tierra templada' from the `tierra fria';
and finally to speed through the endless agave-fields of the upland haciendas,
to Mexico City and home.
Mexico, and the experiences associated with it, have left deep marks
on Alan Seeger's poetry. The vacation voyages thither
speak in this apostrophe from the "Ode to Antares":
Star of the South that now through orient mist
At nightfall off Tampico or Belize
Greetest the sailor, rising from those seas
Where first in me, a fond romanticist,
The tropic sunset's bloom on cloudy piles
Cast out industrious cares with dreams of fabulous isles. . . .
The longest of his poems, "The Deserted Garden" -- a veritable gallery
of imaginative landscape -- is entirely Mexican in colouring.
Indeed we may conjecture without too much rashness that it is a mere expansion
of the sonnet entitled "Tezcotzinco", the fruit of a solitary excursion
to the ruins of Nezahualcoyotl's baths, in the hills beyond Tezcoco.
But even where there is no painting of definite Mexican scenes,
motives from the vast uplands with their cloud pageantry,
and from the palm-fringed, incandescent coasts, frequently recur in his verse.
For instance, he had not forgotten Mexico when he wrote in a volume
of the Comtesse de Noailles:
Be my companion under cool arcades
That frame some drowsy street and dazzling square,
Beyond whose flowers and palm-tree promenades
White belfries burn in the blue tropic air.
And even when the tropics were finally left behind,
he carried with him in his memory their profusion of colour,
an ever-ready palette on which to draw. Assuredly it was a fortunate chance
that took this lover of sunlight and space and splendor,
in his most receptive years, to regions where they superabound.
Perhaps, had he been confined to gloomier climates, he could not have written:
From a boy
I gloated on existence. Earth to me
Seemed all-sufficient, and my sojourn there
One trembling opportunity for joy.
But the same good fortune pursued him throughout. He seemed predestined
to environments of beauty. When, at fourteen, he left his Mexican home,
it was to go to the Hackley School at Tarrytown, N.Y., an institution
placed on a high hill overlooking that noblest of rivers, the Hudson,
and surrounded by a domain of its own, extending to many acres
of meadow and woodland. An attack of scarlet fever in his childhood
had left his health far from robust, and it was thought
that the altitude of Mexico City was too great for him.
He therefore spent one of his vacations among the hills of New Hampshire,
and was afterwards given a year out of school, with the family
of his former tutor, in Southern California -- again a region
famed for its beauty. He returned much improved in health,
and after a concluding year at Hackley, he entered Harvard College in 1906.
He now plunged into wide and miscellaneous reading, both at Harvard,
and at the magnificent Boston Library. During his first two years at college,
his bent seemed to lie rather towards the studious and contemplative
than towards the active life. His brother, at this time,
appeared to him to be of a more pleasure-loving and adventurous disposition;
and there exists a letter to his mother in which, after contrasting,
with obvious allusion to Chaucer's "Prologue", the mediaeval ideals
of the Knight and the Clerk, he adds: "C. is the Knight and I the Clerk,
deriving more keen pleasure from the perusal of a musty old volume
than in pursuing adventure out in the world." But about the middle
of his Harvard career, a marked change came over his habits of thought
and of action. He emerged from his shell, made many friends,
and threw himself with great zest into the social life of his comrades.
It is evident, however, that this did not mean any slackening
in his literary interests. His work gives ample proof of real,
if not of systematic, culture. He genuinely loves and has made his own
many of the great things of the past. His translations from
Dante and Ariosto, for example, show no less sympathy than accomplishment.
Very characteristic is his selection of the Twenty-sixth Canto
of the `Inferno', in which the narrative of Ulysses brings with it
a breath from the great romance of the antique world. It is noteworthy
that before he graduated he took up with zeal and with distinction
the study of Celtic literature -- a corrective, perhaps, in its cooler tones,
to the tropical motives with which his mind was stored.
He was one of the editors of the `Harvard Monthly', to which he made
frequent contributions of verse.
There followed two years (1910-12) in New York -- probably the
least satisfactory years of his life. 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. In the following year he carried his point,
and set off for Paris -- a departure which may fairly be called his Hegira,
the turning-point of his history. That it shortened his span
there can be little doubt. Had he settled down to literary work,
in his native city, he might have lived to old age. But it secured him
four years of the tense and poignant joy of living on which his heart was set;
and during two of these years the joy was of a kind which
absolved him for ever from the reproach of mere hedonism and self-indulgence.
He would certainly have said -- or rather he was continually saying,
in words full of passionate conviction --
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.
It was in the spirit of a romanticist of the eighteen-forties that
he plunged into the life of Paris. He had a room near the Musee de Cluny,
and he found himself thoroughly at home among the artists and students
of the Latin Quarter, though he occasionally varied the `Vie de Boheme'
by excursions into "society" of a more orthodox type.
Paris has had many lovers, but few more devoted than Alan Seeger.
He accepted the life of "die singende, springende, schoene Paris"
with a curious whole-heartedness. Here and there we find evidence
-- for instance, in the first two sonnets -- that he was not blind
to its seamy side. But on the whole he appears to have seen beauty
even in aspects of it for which it is almost as difficult
to find aesthetic as moral justification. The truth is, no doubt,
that the whole spectacle was plunged for him in the glamour of romance.
Paris did not belong to the working-day world, but was like
Baghdad or Samarcand, a city of the Arabian Nights.
How his imagination transfigured it we may see in such a passage as this:
By silvery waters in the plains afar
Glimmers the inland city like a star,
With gilded gates and sunny spires ablaze,
And burnished domes half seen through luminous haze.
Lo, with what opportunity earth teems!
How like a fair its ample beauty seems!
Fluttering with flags its proud pavilions rise:
What bright bazaars, what marvellous merchandise,
Down seething alleys what melodious din,
What clamor, importuning from every booth:
At Earth's great mart where Joy is trafficked in
Buy while thy purse yet swells with golden Youth!
Into this fair he sallied forth, not as one to the manner born,
but with the eagerness of a traveller from a far country, who feels as though
he were living in a dream. His attitude to the whole experience
is curiously ingenuous, but perfectly sane and straightforward.
It is the Paris of Murger in which he lives, not the Paris
of Baudelaire and the Second Empire. He takes his experiences lightly.
There is no sign either of any struggle of the soul or of any very rending
tempest of the heart. There is no posing, self-conscious Byronism,
nor any of that morbid dallying with the idea of "sin"
which gives such an unpleasant flavor to a good deal of romantic poetry,
both French and English. There are traces of disappointment and disillusion,
but they are accepted without a murmur as inevitable incidents
of a great, absorbing experience. All this means, of course,
that there is no tragic depth, and little analytic subtlety, in these poems.
They are the work of a young man enamoured of his youth,
enthusiastically grateful for the gift of life, and entirely at his ease
within his own moral code. He had known none of what he himself calls
"that kind of affliction which alone can unfold the profundities
of the human spirit."
It was in Paris that he produced most of the "Juvenilia". He included
only a few of the pieces which he had written at Harvard and in New York.
Thus all, or nearly all, the poems ranged under that title, are, as he said --
Relics of the time when I too fared
Across the sweet fifth lustrum of my days.
Paris, however, did not absorb him entirely during these years.
He would occasionally set forth on long tramps through the French provinces;
for he loved every aspect of that gracious country. He once spent some weeks
with a friend in Switzerland; but this experience seems to have left no trace
in his work.
Then came the fateful year 1914. His "Juvenilia" having grown
to a passable bulk, he brought them in the early summer to London,
with a view to finding a publisher for them; but it does not appear
that he took any very active steps to that effect. His days were mainly spent
in the British Museum, and his evenings with a coterie of friends
at the Cafe Royal. In the middle of July, his father came to England
and spent a week with him. Of this meeting Mr. Seeger writes:
==
We passed three days at Canterbury -- three days of such intimacy
as we had hardly had since he was a boy in Mexico. For four or five years
I had only seen him a few days at a time, during my hurried visits
to the United States. We explored the old town together,
heard services in the Cathedral, and had long talks in the close.
After service in the Cathedral on a Monday morning,
the last of our stay at Canterbury, Alan was particularly enthusiastic
over the reading of the Psalms, and said "Was there ever such English written
as that of the Bible?" I said good-bye to Alan on July 25th.
==
Two days earlier, the Austrian Ultimatum had been presented to Serbia;
on that very day the time limit expired, the Serbian reply was rejected,
and the Austrian Minister left Belgrade. The wheels of fate
were already whirling.
As soon as it became evident that a European war was inevitable
Alan returned to Paris. He took Bruges on his way, and there left
the manuscript of his poems in the keeping of a printer,
not foreseeing the risks to which he was thus exposing them.
The war was not three weeks old when, along with forty or fifty
of his fellow-countrymen, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion of France.
Why did he take this step? Fundamentally, no doubt, because he felt war
to be one of the supreme experiences of life, from which,
when it offered itself, he could not shrink without disloyalty to his ideal.
Long before the war was anything more than a vague possibility,
he had imagined the time
. . . when courted Death shall claim my limbs and find them
Laid in some desert place alone, or where the tides
Of war's tumultuous waves on the wet sands behind them
Leave rifts of gasping life when their red flood subsides.
So far back indeed as May, 1912, he had written to his mother from Paris:
"Is it not fine the way the Balkan States are triumphing?
I have been so excited over the war, it would have needed
a very small opportunity to have taken me over there." It is evident, then,
that the soldier's life had long been included among the possibilities
which fascinated him. But apart from this general proclivity to adventure,
this desire to "live dangerously", he was impelled by a simple sentiment
of loyalty to the country and city of his heart, which he himself explained
in a letter written from the Aisne trenches to `The New Republic'
(New York, May 22, 1915):
==
I have talked with so many of the young volunteers here. Their case
is little known, even by the French, yet altogether interesting and appealing.
They are foreigners on whom the outbreak of war laid no formal compulsion.
But they had stood on the butte in springtime perhaps,
as Julian and Louise stood, and looked out over the myriad twinkling lights
of the beautiful city. Paris -- mystic, maternal, personified,
to whom they owed the happiest moments of their lives -- Paris was in peril.
Were they not under a moral obligation, no less binding than [that by which]
their comrades were bound legally, to put their breasts between her
and destruction? Without renouncing their nationality, they had yet chosen
to make their homes here beyond any other city in the world.
Did not the benefits and blessings they had received point them a duty
that heart and conscience could not deny?
"Why did you enlist?" In every case the answer was the same.
That memorable day in August came. Suddenly the old haunts were desolate,
the boon companions had gone. It was unthinkable to leave the danger to them
and accept only the pleasures oneself, to go on enjoying
the sweet things of life in defence of which they were perhaps even then
shedding their blood in the north. Some day they would return,
and with honor -- not all, but some. The old order of things
would have irrevocably vanished. There would be a new companionship
whose bond would be the common danger run, the common sufferings borne,
the common glory shared. "And where have you been all the time,
and what have you been doing?" The very question would be a reproach,
though none were intended. How could they endure it?
Face to face with a situation like that, a man becomes reconciled,
justifies easily the part he is playing, and comes to understand,
in a universe where logic counts for so little and sentiment and the impulse
of the heart for so much, the inevitableness and naturalness of war.
Suddenly the world is up in arms. All mankind takes sides. The same faith
that made him surrender himself to the impulses of normal living and of love,
forces him now to make himself the instrument through which a greater force
works out its inscrutable ends through the impulses of terror and repulsion.
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.
==
Already in this passage we can discern the fatalistic acceptance of war
which runs through many of his utterances on the subject,
and may be read especially in the noble conclusion of his poem, "The Hosts":
There was a stately drama writ
By the hand that peopled the earth & air
And set the stars in the infinite
And made night gorgeous & morning fair;
And all that had sense to reason knew
That bloody drama must be gone through.
Some sat & watched how the action veered --
Waited, profited, trembled, cheered --
We saw not clearly nor understood,
But, yielding ourselves to the master hand,
Each in his part, as best he could,
We played it through as the author planned.
It was not, in his own conception, a "war against war" that he was waging;
it was simply a fight for freedom and for France. Some of us may hope
and believe that, in after years, when he was at leisure
to view history in perspective and carry his psychology a little deeper,
he would have allowed, if not more potency, at any rate more adaptability,
to the human will. In order to do so, it would not have been necessary
to abandon his fatalistic creed. He would have seen, perhaps,
that even if we only will what we have to will, the factors which shape
the will -- of the individual, the nation, or the race -- are always changing,
and that it is not only possible but probable that the factors
which make for peace may one day gain the upper hand of those which
(for perfectly definite and tangible reasons) have hitherto made for war.
The fact remains, however, that he shouldered his knapsack
without any theoretic distaste for the soldier's calling.
In so far he was more happily situated than thousands who have made
all the better soldiers for their intense detestation of the stupidity of war.
But this in no way detracts from his loyalty to his personal ideal,
or from the high chivalry of his devotion to France.
The story of his life as a soldier shall be told, so far as possible,
in his own words.
After some brief preliminary training at Rouen he was sent to Toulouse.
Thence, on September 28, 1914, he wrote as follows:
==
2me Regiment Etranger,
Bataillon C., 1re. Cie, 3me Section.
Toulouse, Sept. 28, 1914.
Dear Mother,
. . . We have been putting in our time here at very hard drilling,
and are supposed to have learned in six weeks what the ordinary recruit,
in times of peace, takes all his two years at. We rise at 5,
and work stops in the afternoon at 5. A twelve hours day at one sou a day.
I hope to earn higher wages than this in time to come, but I never expect
to work harder. The early rising hour is splendid for it gives one the chance
to see the most beautiful part of these beautiful autumn days in the South.
We march up to a lovely open field on the end of the ridge
behind the barracks, walking right into the rising sun.
From this panorama, spread about on three sides is incomparably fine
-- yellow cornfields, vineyards, harvest-fields where
the workers and their teams can be seen moving about in tiny figures --
poplars, little hamlets and church-towers, and far away to the south
the blue line of the Pyrenees, the high peaks capped with snow.
It makes one in love with life, it is all so peaceful and beautiful.
But Nature to me is not only hills and blue skies and flowers,
but the Universe, the totality of things, reality as it most obviously
presents itself to us; and in this universe strife and sternness
play as big a part as love and tenderness, and cannot be shirked
by one whose will it is to rule his life in accordance with the cosmic forces
he sees in play about him. I hope you see the thing as I do, and think
that I have done well, being without responsibilities and with no one
to suffer materially by my decision, in taking upon my shoulders, too,
the burden that so much of humanity is suffering under,
and, rather than stand ingloriously aside when the opportunity was given me,
doing my share for the side that I think right. . . .
==
The battalion must have left Toulouse almost immediately
after this was written, for in a post-card of October 10,
from the Camp de Mailly, Aube, he says that they have been there ten days.
A week later he wrote:
==
. . . After two weeks here and less than two months from enlistment,
we are actually going at last to the firing line. By the time
you receive this we shall already perhaps have had our `bapteme de feu'.
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.
Every day, from the distance to the north, has come the booming of the cannon
around Reims and the lines along the Meuse. . . . But imagine how thrilling
it will be tomorrow and the following days, marching toward the front
with the noise of battle growing continually louder before us.
I could tell you where we are going, but I do not want to run any risk
of having this letter stopped by the censor. The whole regiment is going,
four battalions, about 4000 men. You have no idea how beautiful it is to see
the troops undulating along the road in front of one, in `colonnes par quatre'
as far as the eye can see, with the captains and lieutenants on horseback
at the head of their companies. . . . Tomorrow the real hardship
and privations begin. But I go into action with the lightest of light hearts.
The hard work and moments of frightful fatigue have not broken
but hardened me, and I am in excellent health and spirits. . . .
I am happy and full of excitement over the wonderful days that are ahead.
It was such a comfort to receive your letter, and know that you approved
of my action.
==
In a post-card of October 20, postmarked "Vertus", he says:
==
This is the second night's halt of our march to the front. All our way
has been one immense battlefield. It was a magnificent victory for the French
that the world does not fully realize. I think we are marching
to victory too, but whatever we are going to we are going triumphantly.
==
On October 23, he writes from "17 kil. south-east of Reims".
==
Dear Mother. . . . I am sitting on the curbstone of a street
at the edge of the town. The houses end abruptly and the yellow vineyards
begin here. The view is broad and uninterrupted to the crest
ten kilometers or so across the valley. Between this and ourselves are
the lines of the two armies. A fierce cannonading is going on continually,
and I lift my eyes from the sheet at each report, to see the puffs of smoke
two or three miles off. The Germans have been firing salvoes of four shots
over a little village where the French batteries are stationed,
shrapnel that burst in little puffs of white smoke; the French reply
with explosive shells that raise columns of dust over the German lines.
Half of our regiment have left already for the trenches. We may go tonight.
We have made a march of about 75 kilometers in four days, and are now
on the front, ready to be called on at any moment. I am feeling fine,
in my element, for I have always thirsted for this kind of thing,
to be present always where the pulsations are liveliest. Every minute here
is worth weeks of ordinary experience. How beautiful the view is here,
over the sunny vineyards! And what a curious anomaly.
On this slope the grape pickers are singing merrily at their work,
on the other the batteries are roaring. Boom! Boom!
This will spoil one for any other kind of life. The yellow afternoon sunlight
is sloping gloriously across this beautiful valley of Champagne.
Aeroplanes pass continually overhead on reconnaissance. I must mail this now.
There is too much to be said and too little time to say it.
So glad to get your letter. Love and lots of it to all.
Alan.
==
Alas! the hopes of swift, decisive action with which the Legion advanced
were destined to disappointment. They soon settled down for the winter into
the monotonous hardships of trench warfare. Alan described this experience
in admirably vivid letters published in the New York `Sun',
from which a few extracts must suffice. He writes on December 8,
during his fourth period of service in the trenches:
==
We left our camp in the woods before daybreak this morning,
and marched up the hill in single file, under the winter stars. . . .
Through openings in the woods we could see that we were marching
along a high ridge, and on either hand vaporous depths and distances expanded,
the darkness broken sometimes by a far light or the momentary glow
of a magnesium rocket sent up from the German lines.
There is something fascinating if one is stationed on sentry-duty
immediately after arrival, in watching the dawn slowly illumine
one of these new landscapes, from a position taken up under cover of darkness.
The other section has been relieved and departs. We are given the `consigne',
by the preceding sentinel, and are left alone behind a mound of dirt,
facing the north and the blank, perilous night. 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.
The details come out on the hillside opposite, where the silent trenches
of the enemy are hidden a few hundred metres away. We find ourselves
in a woody, mountainous country, with broad horizons and streaks of mist
in the valleys. Our position is excellent this time, a high crest,
with open land sloping down from the trenches and plenty of barbed wire
strung along immediately in front. It would be a hard task
to carry such a line, and there is not much danger that the enemy will try.
With increasing daylight the sentinel takes a sheltered position,
and surveys his new environment through little gaps where the mounds
have been crenellated and covered with branches. Suddenly he starts
as a metallic bang rings out from the woods immediately behind him.
It is of the unmistakable voice of a French 75 starting the day's
artillery duel. By the time the sentinel is relieved, in broad daylight,
the cannonade is general all along the line. He surrenders his post
to a comrade, and crawls down into his bombproof dugout almost reluctantly,
for the long day of inactive waiting has commenced.
==
Though he never expresses even a momentary regret for the choice he has made,
he freely admits that trench warfare is "anything but romantic".
For the artilleryman it is "doubtless very interesting"
but "the poor common soldier" has a pretty mean time of it:
==
His rule is simply to dig himself a hole in the ground
and to keep hidden in it as tightly as possible. Continually under
the fire of the opposing batteries, he is yet never allowed
to get a glimpse of the enemy. Exposed to all the dangers of war,
but with none of its enthusiasm or splendid elan, he is condemned to sit
like an animal in its burrow, and hear the shells whistle over his head,
and take their little daily toll from his comrades.
The winter morning dawns with grey skies and the hoar frost on the fields.
His feet are numb, his canteen frozen, but he is not allowed to make a fire.
The winter night falls, with its prospect of sentry-duty,
and the continual apprehension of the hurried call to arms; he is not
even permitted to light a candle, but must fold himself in his blanket
and lie down cramped in the dirty straw to sleep as best he may.
How different from the popular notion of the evening campfire,
the songs and good cheer.
==
Of the commissariat arrangements he gives, on the whole, a very good account;
but he admits that "to supplement the regular rations with luxuries
such as butter, cheese, preserves, & especially chocolate,
is a matter that occupies more of the young soldier's thoughts
than the invisible enemy. Our corporal told us the other day
that there wasn't a man in the squad that wouldn't exchange his rifle
for a jar of jam." But "though modern warfare allows us to think
more about eating than fighting, still we do not actually forget
that we are in a battle line."
==
Ever over our heads goes on the precise and scientific struggle
of the artillery. Packed elbow to elbow in these obscure galleries,
one might be content to squat all day long, auditor of the magnificent
orchestra of battle, were it not that one becomes so soon habituated to it
that it is no longer magnificent. We hear the voices of cannon
of all calibres and at all distances. We learn to read the score
& distinguish the instruments. Near us are field batteries;
far away are siege guns. Over all there is the unmistakable,
sharp, metallic twang of the French 75, the whistle of its shell
and the lesser report of its explosion.
==
And every now and then comes the bursting of a shell immediately overhead,
and the rattle of its fragments on the roof of the bomb-proof dug-out.
Think what it must have meant to this eager, ardent, pleasure-loving spirit
to sit out, day after day, in a chill, sodden, verminous trench,
a grand orchestral concert of this music of human madness!
The solitude of sentry-duty evidently comes to him as something of a relief.
"It may," he says, "be all that is melancholy if the night is bad
and the winter wind moans through the pines"; but it also
"brings moments of exaltation, if the cloud-banks roll back,
if the moonlight breaks over the windless hills, or the heavens blaze
with the beauty of the northern stars."
==
The sentinel has ample time for reflection. Alone under the stars,
war in its cosmic rather than its moral aspect reveals itself to him. . . .
He thrills with the sense of filling an appointed, necessary place
in the conflict of hosts, and, facing the enemy's crest,
above which the Great Bear wheels upward to the zenith, he feels,
with a sublimity of enthusiasm that he has never before known,
a kind of companionship with the stars.
==
Six days in the trenches alternated with a three days' interval of rest
"either billeted in the stables and haylofts of the village or encamped
in the woods and around the chateau." Thus the winter of 1914-15 wore away,
with little to break its monotony. The heaviest fighting
was all to the northward. One gathers from his poem "The Aisne"
that at Craonne he took part in the repulse of a serious enemy attack;
but there is no mention of this in the letters before me.
On March 12, 1915, he writes to his mother in fierce indignation
over something that has appeared in an American paper as to life
in the Foreign Legion. The writer of the "disgraceful article", he says,
"like many others of his type, was long ago eliminated from our ranks,
for a person buoyed up by no noble purpose is the first to succumb
to the hardships of the winter that we have been through. . . .
If his lies did nothing worse than belittle his comrades,
who are here for motives that he is unable to conceive,
it would be only dishonourable. But when it comes to throwing discredit
on the French Government, that in all its treatment of us
has been generous beyond anything that one would think possible,
it is too shameful for any words to characterize."
With the coming of spring, there was of course some mitigation of the trials
of the winter. Here is an almost idyllic passage from a letter to his sister,
written on the fly-leaves of `Les Confessions de J. J. Rousseau',
Geneve, MDCCLXXXII:
==
We put in a very pleasant week here -- nine hours of guard at night
in our outposts up on the hillside; in the daytime sleep, or foraging
in the ruined villages, loafing in the pretty garden of the chateau,
or reading up in the library. We have cleaned this up now,
and it is an altogether curious sensation to recline here in an easy-chair,
reading some fine old book, and just taking the precaution
not to stay in front of the glassless windows through which
the sharpshooters can snipe at you from their posts in the thickets
on the slopes of the plateau, not six hundred metres away.
Sometimes our artillery opens up and then you lay down your book for a while,
and, looking through a peek-hole, watch the 75's and 120's
throw up fountains of dirt and debris all along the line
of the enemy's trenches.
==
"Spring has come here at last," so the letter closes, "and we are having
beautiful weather. I am going in swimming in the Aisne this afternoon
for the first time. In fine health and spirits."
During the summer, the Legion was moved about a good deal
from sector to sector, and Alan often found himself in pleasant places,
and got a good deal of positive enjoyment out of his life.
On June 18, 1915, he wrote to his mother:
==
You must not be anxious about my not coming back. The chances are
about ten to one that I will. But if I should not, you must be proud,
like a Spartan mother, and feel that it is your contribution
to the triumph of the cause whose righteousness you feel so keenly.
Everybody should take part in this struggle which is to have
so decisive an effect, not only on the nations engaged but on all humanity.
There should be no neutrals, but everyone should bear some part of the burden.
If so large a part should fall to your share, you would be in so far
superior to other women and should be correspondingly proud.
There would be nothing to regret, for I could not have done otherwise
than I did, and I think I could not have done better.
Death is nothing terrible after all. It may mean something
even more wonderful than life. It cannot possibly mean anything worse
to the good soldier.
==
The same note recurs in a letter of two weeks later (July 3):
==
Whether I am on the winning or losing side is not the point with me:
it is being on the side where my sympathies lie that matters,
and I am ready to see it through to the end. Success in life
means doing that thing than which nothing else conceivable
seems more noble or satisfying or remunerative, and this enviable state
I can truly say that I enjoy, for had I the choice I would be
nowhere else in the world than where I am.
==
In this letter he says that an article about Rupert Brooke
in which his name was mentioned "gave him rather more pain than pleasure,
for it rubbed in the matter which most rankled in his heart,
that he never could get his book of poems published before the war."
However he consoles himself with the reflection that the M.S.
is probably as safe at Bruges as anywhere else. "We have finished
our eighth month on the firing line," he says, "and rumors are going round
of an imminent return to the rear for reorganization."
These rumors proved to be well founded, and on July 17,
he wrote on a picture-postcard representing the Lion of Belfort:
==
We have finally come to the rear for a little rest and reorganization,
and are cantoned in a valley not far from Belfort, in the extreme east
of France, very near the Swiss frontier. Since I wrote you last,
all the Americans in the regiment received 48 hours permission in Paris,
and it was a great happiness to get back even for so short a while
and to see again old scenes and faces after almost a year's absence.
We shall be here several weeks perhaps.
==
Three weeks later (August 8) he wrote to his mother:
==
. . . I have always had the passion to play the biggest part within my reach,
and it is really in a sense a supreme success to be allowed to play this.
If I do not come out, I will share the good fortune of those who disappear
at the pinnacle of their careers. Come to love France and understand
the almost unexampled nobility of the effort this admirable people is making,
for that will be the surest way of your finding comfort
for anything that I am ready to suffer in their cause.
==
The spell of rest lasted some two months, and then the Legion
returned to the front in time for the battle in Champagne
"in which" he writes "we took part from the beginning,
the morning of the memorable 25th. September." I cannot resist
quoting at some length from the admirably vivid letter
in which he gave an account of this experience:
==
The part we played in the battle is briefly as follows.
We broke camp about 11 o'clock the night of the 24th, and marched up
through ruined Souain to our place in one of the numerous `boyaux'
where the `troupes d'attaque' were massed. The cannonade was pretty violent
all that night, as it had been for several days previous, but toward dawn
it reached an intensity unimaginable to anyone who has not seen
a modern battle. A little before 9.15 the fire lessened suddenly,
and the crackle of the fusillade between the reports of the cannon
told us that the first wave of assault had left and the attack begun.
At the same time we received the order to advance. The German artillery
had now begun to open upon us in earnest. Amid the most infernal roar of
every kind of fire-arms, and through an atmosphere heavy with dust and smoke,
we marched up through the `boyaux' to the `tranchees de depart'.
At shallow places and over breaches that shells had made in the bank,
we caught momentary glimpses of the blue lines sweeping up the hillside
or silhouetted on the crest where they poured into the German trenches.
When the last wave of the Colonial brigade had left, we followed.
`Bayonette au canon', in lines of `tirailleurs', we crossed
the open space between the lines, over the barbed wire,
where not so many of our men were lying as I had feared,
(thanks to the efficacy of the bombardment) and over the German trench,
knocked to pieces and filled with their dead. In some places
they still resisted in isolated groups. Opposite us, all was over,
and the herds of prisoners were being already led down as we went up.
We cheered, more in triumph than in hate; but the poor devils,
terror-stricken, held up their hands, begged for their lives,
cried "Kamerad", "Bon Francais", even "Vive la France".
We advanced and lay down in columns by twos behind the second crest.
Meanwhile, bridges had been thrown across trenches and `boyaux',
and the artillery, leaving the emplacements where they had been
anchored a whole year, came across and took position in the open,
a magnificent spectacle. Squadrons of cavalry came up.
Suddenly the long, unpicturesque `guerre de tranchees' was at an end,
and the field really presented the aspect of the familiar battle pictures, --
the battalions in manoeuvre, the officers, superbly indifferent to danger,
galloping about on their chargers. But now the German guns, moved back,
began to get our range, and the shells to burst over and around
batteries and troops, many with admirable precision. Here my best comrade
was struck down by shrapnel at my side, -- painfully but not mortally wounded.
I often envied him after that. For now our advanced troops
were in contact with the German second-line defenses,
and these proved to be of a character so formidable
that all further advance without a preliminary artillery preparation
was out of the question. And our role, that of troops in reserve,
was to lie passive in an open field under a shell fire that every hour
became more terrific, while aeroplanes and captive balloons,
to which we were entirely exposed, regulated the fire.
That night we spent in the rain. With portable picks and shovels
each man dug himself in as well as possible. The next day
our concentrated artillery again began the bombardment,
and again the fusillade announced the entrance of the infantry into action.
But this time only the wounded appeared coming back, no prisoners.
I went out and gave water to one of these, eager to get news.
It was a young soldier, wounded in the hand. His face and voice
bespoke the emotion of the experience he had been through,
in a way that I will never forget. "Ah, les salauds!" he cried,
"They let us come right up to the barbed wire without firing. Then a hail
of grenades and balls. My comrade fell, shot through the leg, got up,
and the next moment had his head taken off by a grenade before my eyes."
"And the barbed wire, wasn't it cut down by the bombardment?"
"Not at all in front of us." I congratulated him on having
a `blessure heureuse' and being well out of the affair.
But he thought only of his comrade and went on down the road toward Souain
nursing his mangled hand, with the stream of wounded
seeking their `postes de secours'.
==
He then tells how, in spite of substantial gains, it gradually
"became more and more evident that the German second line of defence
presented obstacles too serious to attempt overcoming for the moment,
and we began going up at night to work at consolidating our advanced trenches
and turning them into a new permanent line." To this time, perhaps,
belongs the incident related by Rif Baer, an Egyptian,
who was his comrade and best friend in the regiment.
A piece of difficult trench work was allotted to the men,
to be finished in one night. "Each was given the limit,
that he was supposed to be able to complete in the time.
It happened that Rif Baer was ill, and, after working a while,
his strength gave out. Alan completed his own job and R. B.'s also,
and although he was quite exhausted by the extra labour,
his eyes glowed with happiness, and he said he had never done
anything in his life that gave him such entire satisfaction."
Summing up the results of the battle, Alan wrote (still in the same letter,
October 25): "It was a satisfaction at least to get out of the trenches,
to meet the enemy face to face and to see German arrogance
turned into suppliance. We knew many splendid moments,
worth having endured many trials for. But in our larger aim,
of piercing their line, of breaking the long deadlock,
of entering Vouziers in triumph, of course we failed." Then he proceeds:
==
This affair only deepened my admiration for, my loyalty to, the French.
If we did not entirely succeed, it was not the fault of the French soldier.
He is a better man, man for man, than the German. Anyone who had seen
the charge of the Marsouins at Souain would acknowledge it.
Never was anything more magnificent. I remember a captain,
badly wounded in the leg, as he passed us, borne back on a litter
by four German prisoners. He asked us what regiment we were,
and when we told him, he cried "Vive la Legion," and kept repeating
"Nous les avons en. Nous les avons en." He was suffering, but,
oblivious of his wound, was still fired with the enthusiasm of the assault
and all radiant with victory. What a contrast with the German wounded
on whose faces was nothing but terror and despair. What is the stimulus
in their slogans of "Gott mit uns" and "Fuer Koenig und Vaterland"
beside that of men really fighting in defense of their country?
Whatever be the force in international conflicts of having justice
and all the principles of personal morality on one's side, it at least
gives the French soldier a strength that's like the strength of ten
against an adversary whose weapon is only brute violence.
It is inconceivable that a Frenchman, forced to yield,
could behave as I saw German prisoners behave, trembling, on their knees,
for all the world like criminals at length overpowered and brought to justice.
Such men have to be driven to the assault, or intoxicated.
But the Frenchman who goes up is possessed with a passion
beside which any of the other forms of experience that are reckoned
to make life worth while seem pale in comparison.
==
A report appeared in the American newspapers that he had been killed
in the battle of Champagne. On learning of it, he wrote to his mother:
==
I am `navre' to think of your having suffered so.
I should have arranged to cable after the attack, had I known
that any such absurd rumours had been started. Here one has
a wholesome notion of the unimportance of the individual.
It needs an effort of imagination to conceive of its making
any particular difference to anyone or anything if one goes under.
So many better men have gone, and yet the world rolls on just the same.
==
After Champagne, his regiment passed to the rear and did not return
to the front until May 1916. On February 1st he writes: "I am in hospital
for the first time, not for a wound, unfortunately, but for sickness."
Hitherto his health, since he joined the army, had been superb.
As a youth he had never been robust; but the soldier's life
suited him to perfection, and all remnants of any mischief left behind
by the illness of his childhood seemed to have vanished.
It was now a sharp attack of bronchitis that sent him to hospital.
On his recovery he obtained two months `conge de convalescence',
part of which he spent at Biarritz and part in Paris. About this time,
much to his satisfaction, he once more came into the possession
of "Juvenilia". On April 13th he wrote to his mother:
==
Did I tell you that the Embassy have managed to get my M.S. for me?
It was very interesting to re-read this work, which I had almost forgotten.
I found much that was good in it, but much that was juvenile too,
and am not so anxious to publish it as it stands. I shall probably
make extracts from it and join it with what I have done since.
I shall go back to the front on the first of May without regrets.
These visits to the rear only confirm me in my conviction
that the work up there on the front is so far the most interesting work
a man can be doing at this moment, that nothing else counts in comparison.
==
On May 13th he wrote to his "marraine", Mrs. Weeks: "The chateau
in the grounds of which we are barracked, has a most beautiful name --
Bellinglise. Isn't it pretty? I shall have to write a sonnet to enclose it,
as a ring is made express for a jewel. It is a wonderful
old seventeenth-century manor, surrounded by a lordly estate.
What is that exquisite stanza in `Maud' about `in the evening
through the lilacs (or laurels) of the old manorial home'?*
Look it up and send it to me." Ten days later he wrote to the same lady:
--
* He was doubtless thinking of this:
Alas for her that met me,
That heard me softly call,
Came glimmering thro' the laurels
In the quiet evenfall,
In the garden by the turrets
Of the old manorial hall.
--
==
The week in the trenches was a week of the most beautiful weather. . . .
These days were saddened by the death of poor Colette in the bombardment,
and by the suffering of his brother who has now returned after the burial.
They were marked on the other hand by two afternoons of rather
memorable emotion. Exasperated by the inactivity of the sector here,
and tempted by danger, I stole off twice after guard,
and made a patrol all by myself through the wood paths and trails
between the lines. In the front of these, at a crossing of paths
not far from one of our posts, I found a burnt rocket-stick
planted in the ground, and a scrap of paper stuck in the top,
placed there by the boches to guide their little mischief-making parties
when they come to visit us in the night. The scrap of paper
was nothing else than a bit of the `Berliner Tageblatt'.
This seemed so interesting to me that I reported it to the captain,
though my going out alone this way is a thing strictly forbidden.
He was very decent about it though, and seemed really interested
in the information. Yesterday afternoon I repeated this exploit,
following another trail, and I went so far that I came clear up
to the German barbed wire, where I left a card with my name.
It was very thrilling work, "courting destruction with taunts,
with invitations" as Whitman would say. I have never been
in a sector like this, where patrols could be made in daylight.
Here the deep forest permits it. It also greatly facilitates ambushes,
for one must keep to the paths, owing to the underbrush.
I and a few others are going to try to get permission
to go out on `patrouilles d'embuscade' and bring in some live prisoners.
It would be quite an extraordinary feat if we could pull it off.
In our present existence it is the only way I can think of
to get the Croix de Guerre. And to be worthy of my marraine
I think that I ought to have the Croix de Guerre.
==
He had hoped to have been in Paris on Decoration Day, May 30th,
to read, before the statue of Lafayette and Washington,
the "Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France",
which he had written at the request of a Committee of American residents;
but his "permission" unfortunately did not arrive in time. Completed in
two days, during which he was engaged in the hardest sort of labour
in the trenches, this Ode is certainly the crown of the poet's achievement.
It is entirely admirable, entirely adequate to the historic occasion.
If the war has produced a nobler utterance, it has not come my way.
On June 24th, he again wrote, giving an account of a march,
which was "without exception the hardest he had ever made" --
"20 kilometers through the blazing sun and in a cloud of dust.
Something around 30 kilograms on the back. About 50 per cent dropped
by the way. By making a supreme effort, I managed to get in at the finish,
with the fifteen men that were all that was left of the section."
He now knew that the great offensive was imminent. "The situation,"
he wrote, "is most interesting and exciting, but I am not at liberty
to say anything about it. My greatest preoccupation now
is whether this affair is coming off before or after the 4th of July.
The indications are that it is going to break very soon.
In that case nothing doing in the way of permission.
But I still have hopes of getting in."
His hopes of getting to Paris were frustrated, as were all his other hopes
save one -- the hope of
That rare privilege of dying well.
On July 1st, the great advance began. At six in the evening of July 4th,
the Legion was ordered to clear the enemy out of the village
of Belloy-en-Santerre. Alan Seeger advanced in the first rush,
and his squad was enfiladed by the fire of six German machine guns,
concealed in a hollow way. Most of them went down, and Alan among them --
wounded in several places. But the following waves of attack
were more fortunate. As his comrades came up to him,
Alan cheered them on; and as they left him behind,
they heard him singing a marching-song in English: --
Accents of ours were in the fierce melee.
They took the village, they drove the invaders out;
but for some reason unknown -- perhaps a very good one --
the battlefield was left unvisited that night. Next morning,
Alan Seeger lay dead.
There is little to add. He wrote his own best epitaph in the "Ode": --
And on those furthest rims of hallowed ground
Where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires,
When the slain bugler has long ceased to sound,
And on the tangled wires
The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops,
Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers: --
Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops,
Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours.
His death was briefly noticed in one or two French papers.
The `Matin' published a translation of part of the poem, "Champagne, 1914-15",
and remarked that "Cyrano de Bergerac would have signed it."
But France had no time, even if she had had the knowledge,
to realize the greatness of the sacrifice that had been made for her.
That will come later. One day France will know that this unassuming
soldier of the Legion,
Who, not unmindful of the antique debt,
Came back the generous path of Lafayette,
was one whom even she may be proud to have reckoned among her defenders.
The "Last Poems" speak for themselves. They contain lines which he would
doubtless have remodelled had he lived to review them in tranquillity --
perhaps one or two pieces, sprung from a momentary mood,
which, on reflection he would have rejected.* But they not only show
a great advance on his earlier work: they rank high, or I am much mistaken,
among the hitherto not very numerous poems in the English language produced,
not in mere memory or imagination of war, but in its actual stress
and under its haunting menace.
--
* Neither in the "Juvenilia" nor in the "Last Poems"
has anything been suppressed that he himself ever thought of publishing.
Indeed nothing at all has been omitted, except two early poems
on which he had written "These are worthless."
--
Again and again in the "Last Poems" -- notably in "Maktoob"
with its tribute to
The resignation and the calm
And wisdom of the East,
he returns to the note of fatalism. Here he has not only
the wisdom of the East but the logic of the West on his side.
Necessity is as incontrovertible to thought as it is incredible to feeling.
But in the potent illusion of free-will (if illusion it be) rests
all morality and all the admiration that we feel for good and evil deeds.
Not even at Alan Seeger's bidding can we quite persuade ourselves that,
when he took up arms for France, he was exercising no brave,
no generous choice, but was the conscript of Destiny.
William Archer.
Poems by Alan Seeger
Juvenilia
1914
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.
Now when, the drift of old desire renewing,
Warm tides flow northward over valley and field,
When half-forgotten sound and scent are wooing
From their deep-chambered recesses long sealed
Such memories as breathe once more
Of childhood and the happy hues it wore,
Now, with a fervor that has never been
In years gone by, it stirs me to respond, --
Not as a force whose fountains are within
The faculties of the percipient mind,
Subject with them to darkness and decay,
But something absolute, something beyond,
Oft met like tender orbs that seem to peer
From pale horizons, luminous behind
Some fringe of tinted cloud at close of day;
And in this flood of the reviving year,
When to the loiterer by sylvan streams,
Deep in those cares that make Youth loveliest,
Nature in every common aspect seems
To comment on the burden in his breast --
The joys he covets and the dreams he dreams --
One then with all beneath the radiant skies
That laughs with him or sighs,
It courses through the lilac-scented air,
A blessing on the fields, a wonder everywhere.
Spirit of Beauty, whose sweet impulses,
Flung like the rose of dawn across the sea,
Alone can flush the exalted consciousness
With shafts of sensible divinity --
Light of the World, essential loveliness:
Him whom the Muse hath made thy votary
Not from her paths and gentle precepture
Shall vulgar ends engage, nor break the spell
That taught him first to feel thy secret charms
And o'er the earth, obedient to their lure,
Their sweet surprise and endless miracle,
To follow ever with insatiate arms.
On summer afternoons,
When from the blue horizon to the shore,
Casting faint silver pathways like the moon's
Across the Ocean's glassy, mottled floor,
Far clouds uprear their gleaming battlements
Drawn to the crest of some bleak eminence,
When autumn twilight fades on the sere hill
And autumn winds are still;
To watch the East for some emerging sign,
Wintry Capella or the Pleiades
Or that great huntsman with the golden gear;
Ravished in hours like these
Before thy universal shrine
To feel the invoked presence hovering near,
He stands enthusiastic. Star-lit hours
Spent on the roads of wandering solitude
Have set their sober impress on his brow,
And he, with harmonies of wind and wood
And torrent and the tread of mountain showers,
Has mingled many a dedicative vow
That holds him, till thy last delight be known,
Bound in thy service and in thine alone.
I, too, among the visionary throng
Who choose to follow where thy pathway leads,
Have sold my patrimony for a song,
And donned the simple, lowly pilgrim's weeds.
From that first image of beloved walls,
Deep-bowered in umbrage of ancestral trees,
Where earliest thy sweet enchantment falls,
Tingeing a child's fantastic reveries
With radiance so fair it seems to be
Of heavens just lost the lingering evidence
From that first dawn of roseate infancy,
So long beneath thy tender influence
My breast has thrilled. As oft for one brief second
The veil through which those infinite offers beckoned
Has seemed to tremble, letting through
Some swift intolerable view
Of vistas past the sense of mortal seeing,
So oft, as one whose stricken eyes might see
In ferny dells the rustic deity,
I stood, like him, possessed, and all my being,
Flooded an instant with unwonted light,
Quivered with cosmic passion; whether then
On woody pass or glistening mountain-height
I walked in fellowship with winds and clouds,
Whether in cities and the throngs of men,
A curious saunterer through friendly crowds,
Enamored of the glance in passing eyes,
Unuttered salutations, mute replies, --
In every character where light of thine
Has shed on earthly things the hue of things divine
I sought eternal Loveliness, and seeking,
If ever transport crossed my brow bespeaking
Such fire as a prophetic heart might feel
Where simple worship blends in fervent zeal,
It was the faith that only love of thee
Needed in human hearts for Earth to see
Surpassed the vision poets have held dear
Of joy diffused in most communion here;
That whomsoe'er thy visitations warmed,
Lover of thee in all thy rays informed,
Needed no difficulter discipline
To seek his right to happiness within
Than, sensible of Nature's loveliness,
To yield him to the generous impulses
By such a sentiment evoked. The thought,
Bright Spirit, whose illuminings I sought,
That thou unto thy worshipper might be
An all-sufficient law, abode with me,
Importing something more than unsubstantial dreams
To vigils by lone shores and walks by murmuring streams.
Youth's flowers like childhood's fade and are forgot.
Fame twines a tardy crown of yellowing leaves.
How swift were disillusion, were it not
That thou art steadfast where all else deceives!
Solace and Inspiration, Power divine
That by some mystic sympathy of thine,
When least it waits and most hath need of thee,
Can startle the dull spirit suddenly
With grandeur welled from unsuspected springs, --
Long as the light of fulgent evenings,
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;
Be thou my worship, thou my sole desire,
Thy paths my pilgrimage, my sense a lyre
Aeolian for thine every breath to stir;
Oft when her full-blown periods recur,
To see the birth of day's transparent moon
Far from cramped walls may fading afternoon
Find me expectant on some rising lawn;
Often depressed in dewy grass at dawn,
Me, from sweet slumber underneath green boughs,
Ere the stars flee may forest matins rouse,
Afoot when the great sun in amber floods
Pours horizontal through the steaming woods
And windless fumes from early chimneys start
And many a cock-crow cheers the traveller's heart
Eager for aught the coming day afford
In hills untopped and valleys unexplored.
Give me the white road into the world's ends,
Lover of roadside hazard, roadside friends,
Loiterer oft by upland farms to gaze
On ample prospects, lost in glimmering haze
At noon, or where down odorous dales twilit,
Filled with low thundering of the mountain stream,
Over the plain where blue seas border it
The torrid coast-towns gleam.
I have fared too far to turn back now; my breast
Burns with the lust for splendors unrevealed,
Stars of midsummer, clouds out of the west,
Pallid horizons, winds that valley and field
Laden with joy, be ye my refuge still!
What though distress and poverty assail!
Though other voices chide, yours never will.
The grace of a blue sky can never fail.
Powers that my childhood with a spell so sweet,
My youth with visions of such glory nursed,
Ye have beheld, nor ever seen my feet
On any venture set, but 'twas the thirst
For Beauty willed them, yea, whatever be
The faults I wanted wings to rise above;
I am cheered yet to think how steadfastly
I have been loyal to the love of Love!
The Deserted Garden
I know a village in a far-off land
Where from a sunny, mountain-girdled plain
With tinted walls a space on either hand
And fed by many an olive-darkened lane
The high-road mounts, and thence a silver band
Through vineyard slopes above and rolling grain,
Winds off to that dim corner of the skies
Where behind sunset hills a stately city lies.
Here, among trees whose overhanging shade
Strews petals on the little droves below,
Pattering townward in the morning weighed
With greens from many an upland garden-row,
Runs an old wall; long centuries have frayed
Its scalloped edge, and passers to and fro
Heard never from beyond its crumbling height
Sweet laughter ring at noon or plaintive song at night.
But here where little lizards bask and blink
The tendrils of the trumpet-vine have run,
At whose red bells the humming bird to drink
Stops oft before his garden feast is done;
And rose-geraniums, with that tender pink
That cloud-banks borrow from the setting sun,
Have covered part of this old wall, entwined
With fair plumbago, blue as evening heavens behind.
And crowning other parts the wild white rose
Rivals the honey-suckle with the bees.
Above the old abandoned orchard shows
And all within beneath the dense-set trees,
Tall and luxuriant the rank grass grows,
That settled in its wavy depth one sees
Grass melt in leaves, the mossy trunks between,
Down fading avenues of implicated green;
Wherein no lack of flowers the verdurous night
With stars and pearly nebula o'erlay;
Azalea-boughs half rosy and half white
Shine through the green and clustering apple-spray,
Such as the fairy-queen before her knight
Waved in old story, luring him away
Where round lost isles Hesperian billows break
Or towers loom up beneath the clear, translucent lake;
And under the deep grass blue hare-bells hide,
And myrtle plots with dew-fall ever wet,
Gay tiger-lilies flammulate and pied,
Sometime on pathway borders neatly set,
Now blossom through the brake on either side,
Where heliotrope and weedy mignonette,
With vines in bloom and flower-bearing trees,
Mingle their incense all to swell the perfumed breeze,
That sprung like Hermes from his natal cave
In some blue rampart of the curving West,
Comes up the valleys where green cornfields wave,
Ravels the cloud about the mountain crest,
Breathes on the lake till gentle ripples pave
Its placid floor; at length a long-loved guest,
He steals across this plot of pleasant ground,
Waking the vocal leaves to a sweet vernal sound.
Here many a day right gladly have I sped,
Content amid the wavy plumes to lie,
And through the woven branches overhead
Watch the white, ever-wandering clouds go by,
And soaring birds make their dissolving bed
Far in the azure depths of summer sky,
Or nearer that small huntsman of the air,
The fly-catcher, dart nimbly from his leafy lair;
Pillowed at ease to hear the merry tune
Of mating warblers in the boughs above
And shrill cicadas whom the hottest noon
Keeps not from drowsy song; the mourning dove
Pours down the murmuring grove his plaintive croon
That like the voice of visionary love
Oft have I risen to seek through this green maze
(Even as my feet thread now the great world's garden-ways);
And, parting tangled bushes as I passed
Down beechen alleys beautiful and dim,
Perhaps by some deep-shaded pool at last
My feet would pause, where goldfish poise and swim,
And snowy callas' velvet cups are massed
Around the mossy, fern-encircled brim.
Here, then, that magic summoning would cease,
Or sound far off again among the orchard trees.
And here where the blanched lilies of the vale
And violets and yellow star-flowers teem,
And pink and purple hyacinths exhale
Their heavy fume, once more to drowse and dream
My head would sink, from many an olden tale
Drawing imagination's fervid theme,
Or haply peopling this enchanting spot
Only with fair creations of fantastic thought.
For oft I think, in years long since gone by,
That gentle hearts dwelt here and gentle hands
Stored all this bowery bliss to beautify
The paradise of some unsung romance;
Here, safe from all except the loved one's eye,
'Tis sweet to think white limbs were wont to glance,
Well pleased to wanton like the flowers and share
Their simple loveliness with the enamored air.
Thrice dear to them whose votive fingers decked
The altars of First Love were these green ways, --
These lawns and verdurous brakes forever flecked
With the warm sunshine of midsummer days;
Oft where the long straight allies intersect
And marble seats surround the open space,
Where a tiled pool and sculptured fountain stand,
Hath Evening found them seated, silent, hand in hand.
When twilight deepened, in the gathering shade
Beneath that old titanic cypress row,
Whose sombre vault and towering colonnade
Dwarfed the enfolded forms that moved below,
Oft with close steps these happy lovers strayed,
Till down its darkening aisle the sunset glow
Grew less and patterning the garden floor
Faint flakes of filtering moonlight mantled more and more.
And the strange tempest that a touch imparts
Through the mid fibre of the molten frame,
When the sweet flesh in early youth asserts
Its heyday verve and little hints enflame,
Disturbed them as they walked; from their full hearts
Welled the soft word, and many a tender name
Strove on their lips as breast to breast they strained
And the deep joy they drank seemed never, never drained.
Love's soul that is the depth of starry skies
Set in the splendor of one upturned face
To beam adorably through half-closed eyes;
Love's body where the breadth of summer days
And all the beauty earth and air comprise
Come to the compass of an arm's embrace,
To burn a moment on impassioned lips
And yield intemperate joy to quivering finger-tips,
They knew; and here where morning-glories cling
Round carven forms of carefullest artifice,
They made a bower where every outward thing
Should comment on the cause of their own bliss;
With flowers of liveliest hue encompassing
That flower that the beloved body is --
That rose that for the banquet of Love's bee
Has budded all the aeons of past eternity.
But their choice seat was where the garden wall,
Crowning a little summit, far and near,
Looks over tufted treetops onto all
The pleasant outer country; rising here
From rustling foliage where cuckoos call
On summer evenings, stands a belvedere,
Buff-hued, of antique plaster, overrun
With flowering vines and weatherworn by rain and sun.
Still round the turrets of this antique tower
The bougainvillea hangs a crimson crown,
Wistaria-vines and clematis in flower,
Wreathing the lower surface further down,
Hide the old plaster in a very shower
Of motley blossoms like a broidered gown.
Outside, ascending from the garden grove,
A crumbling stairway winds to the one room above.
And whoso mounts by this dismantled stair
Finds the old pleasure-hall, long disarrayed,
Brick-tiled and raftered, and the walls foursquare
Ringed all about with a twofold arcade.
Backward dense branches intercept the glare
Of afternoon with eucalyptus shade;
Eastward the level valley-plains expand,
Sweet as a queen's survey of her own Fairyland.
For through that frame the ivied arches make,
Wide tracts of sunny midland charm the eye,
Frequent with hamlet, grove, and lucent lake
Where the blue hills' inverted contours lie;
Far to the east where billowy mountains break
In surf of snow against a sapphire sky,
Huge thunderheads loom up behind the ranges,
Changing from gold to pink as deepening sunset changes;
And over plain and far sierra spread
The fulgent rays of fading afternoon,
Showing each utmost peak and watershed
All clarified, each tassel and festoon
Of floating cloud embroidered overhead,
Like lotus-leaves on bluest waters strewn,
Flushing with rose, while all breathes fresh and free
In peace and amplitude and bland tranquillity.
Dear were such evenings to this gentle pair;
Love's tide that launched on with a blast too strong
Sweeps toward the foaming reef, the hidden snare,
Baffling with fond illusion's siren-song,
Too faint, on idle shoals, to linger there
Far from Youth's glowing dream, bore them along,
With purple sail and steered by seraph hands
To isles resplendent in the sunset of romance.
And out of this old house a flowery fane,
A bridal bower, a pearly pleasure-dome,
They built, and furnished it with gold and grain,
And bade all spirits of beauty hither come,
And winged Love to enter with his train
And bless their pillow, and in this his home
Make them his priests as Hero was of yore
In her sweet girlhood by the blue Dardanian shore.
Tree-ferns, therefore, and potted palms they brought,
Tripods and urns in rare and curious taste,
Polychrome chests and cabinets inwrought
With pearl and ivory etched and interlaced;
Pendant brocades with massive braid were caught,
And chain-slung, oriental lamps so placed
To light the lounger on some low divan,
Sunken in swelling down and silks from Hindustan.
And there was spread, upon the ample floors,
Work of the Levantine's laborious loom,
Such as by Euxine or Ionian shores
Carpets the dim seraglio's scented gloom.
Each morn renewed, the garden's flowery stores
Blushed in fair vases, ochre and peach-bloom,
And little birds through wicker doors left wide
Flew in to trill a space from the green world outside.
And there was many a dainty attitude,
Bronze and eburnean. All but disarrayed,
Here in eternal doubt sweet Psyche stood
Fain of the bath's delight, yet still afraid
Lest aught in that palatial solitude
Lurked of most menace to a helpless maid.
Therefore forever faltering she stands,
Nor yet the last loose fold slips rippling from her hands.
Close by upon a beryl column, clad
In the fresh flower of adolescent grace,
They set the dear Bithynian shepherd lad,
The nude Antinous. That gentle face,
Forever beautiful, forever sad,
Shows but one aspect, moon-like, to our gaze,
Yet Fancy pictures how those lips could smile
At revelries in Rome, and banquets on the Nile.
And there were shapes of Beauty myriads more,
Clustering their rosy bridal bed around,
Whose scented breadth a silken fabric wore
Broidered with peacock hues on creamiest ground,
Fit to have graced the barge that Cydnus bore
Or Venus' bed in her enchanted mound,
While pillows swelled in stuffs of Orient dyes,
All broidered with strange fruits and birds of Paradise.
'Twas such a bower as Youth has visions of,
Thither with one fair spirit to retire,
Lie upon rose-leaves, sleep and wake with Love
And feast on kisses to the heart's desire;
Where by a casement opening on a grove,
Wide to the wood-winds and the sweet birds' choir,
A girl might stand and gaze into green boughs,
Like Credhe at the window of her golden house.
Or most like Vivien, the enchanting fay,
Where with her friend, in the strange tower they planned,
She lies and dreams eternity away,
Above the treetops in Broceliande,
Sometimes at twilight when the woods are gray
And wolf-packs howl far out across the lande,
Waking to love, while up behind the trees
The large midsummer moon lifts -- even so loved these.
For here, their pleasure was to come and sit
Oft when the sun sloped midway to the west,
Watching with sweet enjoyment interknit
The long light slant across the green earth's breast,
And clouds upon the ranges opposite,
Rolled up into a gleaming thundercrest,
Topple and break and fall in purple rain,
And mist of summer showers trail out across the plain.
Whereon the shafts of ardent light, far-flung
Across the luminous azure overhead,
Ofttimes in arcs of transient beauty hung
The fragmentary rainbow's green and red.
Joy it was here to love and to be young,
To watch the sun sink to his western bed,
And streaming back out of their flaming core
The vesperal aurora's glorious banners soar.
Tinging each altitude of heaven in turn,
Those fiery rays would sweep. The cumuli
That peeped above the mountain-tops would burn
Carmine a space; the cirrus-whorls on high,
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.
New fragrance on the freshening atmosphere
Would steal with evening, and the sunset glow
Draw deeper down into the wondrous west
Round vales of Proserpine and islands of the blest.
So dusk would come and mingle lake and shore,
The snow-peaks fade to frosty opaline,
To pearl the domed clouds the mountains bore,
Where late the sun's effulgent fire had been --
Showing as darkness deepened more and more
The incandescent lightnings flare within,
And Night that furls the lily in the glen
And twines impatient arms would fall, and then -- and then . . .
Sometimes the peasant, coming late from town
With empty panniers on his little drove
Past the old lookout when the Northern Crown
Glittered with Cygnus through the scented grove,
Would hear soft noise of lute-strings wafted down
And voices singing through the leaves above
Those songs that well from the warm heart that woos
At balconies in Merida or Vera Cruz.
And he would pause under the garden wall,
Caught in the spell of that voluptuous strain,
With all the sultry South in it, and all
Its importunity of love and pain;
And he would wait till the last passionate fall
Died on the night, and all was still again, --
Then to his upland village wander home,
Marvelling whence that flood of elfin song might come.
O lyre that Love's white holy hands caress,
Youth, from thy bosom welled their passionate lays --
Sweet opportunity for happiness
So brief, so passing beautiful -- O days,
When to the heart's divine indulgences
All earth in smiling ministration pays --
Thine was the source whose plenitude, past over,
What prize shall rest to pluck, what secret to discover!
The wake of color that follows her when May
Walks on the hills loose-haired and daisy-crowned,
The deep horizons of a summer's day,
Fair cities, and the pleasures that abound
Where music calls, and crowds in bright array
Gather by night to find and to be found;
What were these worth or all delightful things
Without thine eyes to read their true interpretings!
For thee the mountains open glorious gates,
To thee white arms put out from orient skies,
Earth, like a jewelled bride for one she waits,
Decks but to be delicious in thine eyes,
Thou guest of honor for one day, whose fetes
Eternity has travailed to devise;
Ah, grace them well in the brief hour they last!
Another's turn prepares, another follows fast.
Yet not without one fond memorial
Let my sun set who found the world so fair!
Frail verse, when Time the singer's coronal
Has rent, and stripped the rose-leaves from his hair,
Be thou my tablet on the temple wall!
Among the pious testimonials there,
Witness how sweetly on my heart as well
The miracles of dawn and starry evening fell!
Speak of one then who had the lust to feel,
And, from the hues that far horizons take,
And cloud and sunset, drank the wild appeal,
Too deep to live for aught but life's sweet sake,
Whose only motive was the will to kneel
Where Beauty's purest benediction spake,
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 --
That coming one whose feet in other days
Shall bleed like mine for ever having, more
Than any purpose, felt the need to praise
And seek the angelic image to adore,
In love with Love, its wonderful, sweet ways
Counting what most makes life worth living for,
That so some relic may be his to see
How I loved these things too and they were dear to me.
I sometimes think a conscious happiness
Mantles through all the rose's sentient vine
When summer winds with myriad calyces
Of bloom its clambering height incarnadine;
I sometimes think that cleaving lips, no less,
And limbs that crowned desires at length entwine
Are nerves through which that being drinks delight,
Whose frame is the green Earth robed round with day and night.
And such were theirs: the traveller without,
Pausing at night under the orchard trees,
Wondered and crossed himself in holy doubt,
For through their song and in the murmuring breeze
It seemed angelic choirs were all about
Mingling in universal harmonies,
As though, responsive to the chords they woke,
All Nature into sweet epithalamium broke.
And still they think a spirit haunts the place:
'Tis said, when Night has drawn her jewelled pall
And through the branches twinkling fireflies trace
Their mimic constellations, if it fall
That one should see the moon rise through the lace
Of blossomy boughs above the garden wall,
That surely would he take great ill thereof
And famish in a fit of unexpressive love.
But this I know not, for what time the wain
Was loosened and the lily's petal furled,
Then I would rise, climb the old wall again,
And pausing look forth on the sundown world,
Scan the wide reaches of the wondrous plain,
The hamlet sites where settling smoke lay curled,
The poplar-bordered roads, and far away
Fair snowpeaks colored with the sun's last ray.
Waves of faint sound would pulsate from afar --
Faint song and preludes of the summer night;
Deep in the cloudless west the evening star
Hung 'twixt the orange and the emerald light;
From the dark vale where shades crepuscular
Dimmed the old grove-girt belfry glimmering white,
Throbbing, as gentlest breezes rose or fell,
Came the sweet invocation of the evening bell.
The Torture of Cuauhtemoc
Their strength had fed on this when Death's white arms
Came sleeved in vapors and miasmal dew,
Curling across the jungle's ferny floor,
Becking each fevered brain. On bleak divides,
Where Sleep grew niggardly for nipping cold
That twinged blue lips into a mouthed curse,
Not back to Seville and its sunny plains
Winged their brief-biding dreams, but once again,
Lords of a palace in Tenochtitlan,
They guarded Montezuma's treasure-hoard.
Gold, like some finny harvest of the sea,
Poured out knee deep around the rifted floors,
Shiny and sparkling, -- arms and crowns and rings:
Gold, sweet to toy with as beloved hair, --
To plunge the lustful, crawling fingers down,
Arms elbow deep, and draw them out again,
And watch the glinting metal trickle off,
Even as at night some fisherman, home bound
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