Poem of the Day: ‘I Have a Rendezvous with Death’

Alan Seeger (1888–1916) was an American, stern Protestant, and minor poet who ended up dying at the Battle of the Somme, fighting with the French Foreign Legion. World War I is far more famous for its poets — a literary generation lost in battle — than any other war. Period. There is no war, ancient or modern, that produced as many young poets who blossomed with their first poetic flowers. Few of them lived beyond their first publications.Last year for Veterans Day on November 11, we ran as Poems of the Day here in The New York Sun, a week of war poetry, five poems chosen and introduced by the writer (and veteran) Phil Klay. Veterans Day (Armistice Day and Remembrance Day, in other English-speaking countries) falls on a Saturday this year. And the Sun has chosen another week of war poetry — but all from World War I. Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” is rivaled perhaps only by the Canadian John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” as the best-known poem of those World War I poets. The darker lines of the likes of Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen, even the nature poems of Edward Thomas, would take longer to be appreciated. But Seeger was not simply an amateur, the way McCrae was. Seeger was a serious young man whose poetic bent (he graduated from Harvard with T.S. Eliot) was seeking his adult voice. He still hadn’t quite found it when he wrote “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” but the poem is affecting and shows the promise lost when he died on July 4, 1916. In tetrameter lines, with three stanzas of varying length and rhyme schemes, he takes the pose of a man who knows that he will die but has chosen to hold to his duty. “At midnight in some flaming town, / When Spring trips north again this year, / And I to my pledged word am true,” he writes, “I shall not fail that rendezvous.”I Have a Rendezvous with Deathby Alan SeegerI have a rendezvous with DeathAt some disputed barricade,When Spring comes back with rustling shadeAnd apple-blossoms fill the air —I have a rendezvous with DeathWhen Spring brings back blue days and fair.It may be he shall take my handAnd lead me into his dark landAnd close my eyes and quench my breath —It may be I shall pass him still.I have a rendezvous with DeathOn some scarred slope of battered hill,When Spring comes round again this yearAnd the first meadow-flowers appear.God knows ’twere better to be deepPillowed 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 DeathAt 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.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘I Have a Rendezvous with Death’

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