Poems of Alan Seeger Part 1

Poems.

by Alan Seeger.

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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.suredly 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 n.o.ble.

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; Sh.e.l.ley'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 Sh.e.l.ley, Byron or Keats, though I think none of them would have disdained his gift of song.

But a.s.suredly 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 pa.s.sion 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 va.s.sal 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 att.i.tude 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 doc.u.ment, 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, pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.s from the United States to Mexico is like pa.s.sing 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 s.p.a.cious 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 Tenocht.i.tlan 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 alt.i.tudes.

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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sociated 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 ent.i.tled "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. a.s.suredly it was a fortunate chance that took this lover of sunlight and s.p.a.ce 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 inst.i.tution placed on a high hill overlooking that n.o.blest 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 alt.i.tude 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 pa.s.sionate 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'