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,

Her courts are by the flux of flaming ways,
Between the rivers and the illumined sky Whose fervid depths reverberate from on high Fierce lustres mingled in a fiery haze
They mark it inland; blithe and fair of face Her suitors follow, gue...

Thy petals yet are closely curled,
Rose of the world,
Around their scented, golden core;
Nor yet has Summer purpled o'er Thy tender clusters that begin To swell within The dewy vine-leaves' early screen Of sheltering green

Over the radiant ridges borne out on the offshore wind,
I have sailed as a butterfly sails whose priming wings unfurled Leave the familiar gardens and visited fields behind To follow a cloud in the east rose-flushed on the rim of the world

A hilltop sought by every soothing breeze That loves the melody of murmuring boughs,
Cool shades, green acreage, and antique house Fronting the ocean and the dawn; than these Old monks built never for the spirit's ease Cloisters more calm — n...

First,
London, for its myriads; for its height,
Manhattan heaped in towering stalagmite;
But Paris for the smoothness of the paths That lead the heart unto the heart's delight

O happiness,
I know not what far seas,
Blue hills and deep, thy sunny realms surround,
That thus in Music's wistful harmonies And concert of sweet sound A rumor steals, from some uncertain shore,

Florence, rejoice
For thou o'er land and sea So spread'st thy pinions that the fame of thee Hath reached no less into the depths of Hell
So noble were the five I found to dwell Therein — thy sons — whence shame accrues to me And no great...

Seeing you have not come with me, nor spent This day's suggestive beauty as we ought,
I have gone forth alone and been content To make you mistress only of my thought
And I have blessed the fate that was so kind In my life's agitations t...

(To have been read before the statue of Lafayette and Washington
Paris, on Decoration Day,
May 30, 1916
) Ay, it is fitting on this holiday, Commemorative of our soldier dead, When—with sweet flowers of our New England May Hiding th...