Alan Seeger

I know a village in a far-off
Where from a sunny, mountain-girdled
With tinted walls a space on either
And fed by many an olive-darkened

I have sought Happiness, but it has been A lovely rainbow, baffling all pursuit,
And tasted Pleasure, but it was a fruit More fair of outward hue than sweet within
Renouncing both, a flake in the ferment Of battling hosts that conquer or...

Do you remember once, in Paris of glad faces,
The night we wandered off under the third moon's rays And, leaving far behind bright streets and busy places,
Stood where the Seine flowed down between its quiet quais
The city's voice w...

I have gone sometimes by the gates of Death And stood beside the cavern through whose doors Enter the voyagers into the unseen
From that dread threshold only, gazing back,
Have eyes in swift illumination seen Life utterly revealed, and g...

In the glad revels, in the happy fetes,
When cheeks are flushed, and glasses gilt and pearled With the sweet wine of France that concentrates The sunshine and the beauty of the world,
Drink sometimes, you whose footsteps yet may tread Th...

A shell surprised our post one day And killed a comrade at my side
My heart was sick to see the way He suffered as he died
I dug about the place he fell, And found, no bigger than my thumb,
A fragment of the splintered shell In warm...

So when the verdure of his life was shed,
With all the grace of ripened manlihead,
And on his locks, but now so lovable,
Old age like desolating winter fell,