Alan Seeger was an American poet who had graduated from Harvard and moved to France to pursue a life of literature, arts, and writing. When war broke out between Germany and France, he felt compelled by a love of France and a youthful, romanticized notion of war to join the French Foreign Legion. He died in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 at the age of twenty-eight. Writers and literary critics often express the belief that his best writing was before him, had he been able to mature as a poet. Nevertheless, his poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” expresses thoughts and feelings that many men and women on the battlefield can relate to.
I Have a Rendezvous with Death
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back 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.
In the Public Domain