Poems   By: Alan Seeger (1888-1916)

[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.