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Alan Seeger as a student at Harvard, 1910
Alan Seeger's "Rendezvous" echoes a letter he wrote in 1915:
"If [death] must be, let it come in the heat of action. Why flinch? It is by far the noblest form
in which death can come. It is in a sense almost a privilege... ."
Alan Seeger had his rendezvous with death at Belloy-en-Santerre on July 4, 1916. His poem "Rendezvous" was published posthumously in 1917.
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Rendezvous
- I have a rendezvous with Death
- At some disputed barricade
- When Spring comes round with rustling shade
- And apple blossoms fill the air.
- I have a rendezvous with Death
- When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
- It may be he shall take my hand
- And lead me into his dark land
- And close my eyes and quench my breath;
- It may be I shall pass him still.
- I have a rendezvous with Death
- On some scarred slope of battered hill,
- When Spring comes round again this year
- And the first meadow flowers appear.
- God knows ‘twere better to be deep
- Pillowed in silk and scented down,
- Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
- Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
- Where hushed awakenings are dear …
- But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
- At midnight in some flaming town,
- When Spring trips north again this year,
- And I to my pledged word am true,
- I shall not fail that rendezvous.
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Alan Seeger, born in 1888, was twenty-two when this photograph was taken while he was a student at Harvard. Seeger spent two years in the French Foreign Legion; as an American citizen he could not join the French military, so he did the next best thing and joined the Legion, since the United States had not yet entered the war against the Central Powers. 