Poems Alan Seeger (1917) Edited for the Web by Bob Blair

Sonnet I

DOWN the strait vistas where a city street

Fades in pale dust and vaporous distances,

Stained with far fumes the light grows less and less

And the sky reddens round the day's retreat.

Now out of orient chambers, cool and sweet,

Like Nature's pure lustration, Dusk comes down.

Now the lamps brighten and the quickening town

Rings with the trample of returning feet.

And Pleasure, risen from her own warm mould

Sunk all the drowsy and unloved daylight

In layers of odorous softness, Paphian girls

Cover with gauze, with satin, and with pearls,

Crown, and about her spangly vestments fold

The ermine of the empire of the Night.

Alan Seeger

Sonnet II

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, guessing by the glare

Beyond the hilltops in the evening air

How bright the cressets at her portals blaze.

On the pure fronts Defeat ere many a day

Falls like the soot and dirt on city-snow;

There hopes deferred lie sunk in piteous seams.

Her paths are disillusion and decay,

With ruins piled and unapparent woe,

The graves of Beauty and the wreck of dreams.

Alan Seeger

Sonnet III

THERE was a youth around whose early way

White angels hung in converse and sweet choir,

Teaching in summer clouds his thought to stray, -- -

In cloud and far horizon to desire.

His life was nursed in beauty, like the stream

Born of clear showers and the mountain dew,

Close under snow-clad summits where they gleam

Forever pure against heaven's orient blue.

Within the city's shades he walked at last.

Faint and more faint in sad recessional

Down the dim corridors of Time outworn,

A chorus ebbed from that forsaken past,

A hymn of glories fled beyond recall

With the lost heights and splendor of life's morn.

Alan Seeger

Sonnet IV

UP AT his attic sill the South wind came

And days of sun and storm but never peace.

Along the town's tumultuous arteries

He heard the heart-throbs of a sentient frame:

Each night the whistles in the bay, the same

Whirl of incessant wheels and clanging cars:

For smoke that half obscured, the circling stars

Burnt like his youth with but a sickly flame.

Up to his attic came the city cries -- -

The throes with which her iron sinews heave -- -

And yet forever behind prison doors

Welled in his heart and trembled in his eyes

The light that hangs on desert hills at eve

And tints the sea on solitary shores. . . .

Alan Seeger

Sonnet V

A TIDE of beauty with returning May

Floods the fair city; from warm pavements fume

Odors endeared; down avenues in bloom

The chestnut-trees with phallic spires are gay.

Over the terrace flows the thronged cafe;

The boulevards are streams of hurrying sound;

And through the streets, like veins when they abound,

The lust for pleasure throbs itself away.

Here let me live, here let me still pursue

Phantoms of bliss that beckon and recede, -- -

Thy strange allurements, City that I love,

Maze of romance, where I have followed too

The dream Youth treasures of its dearest need

And stars beyond thy towers bring tidings of.

Alan Seeger

Sonnet VI

GIVE me the treble of thy horns and hoofs,

The ponderous undertones of 'bus and tram,

A garret and a glimpse across the roofs

Of clouds blown eastward over Notre Dame,

The glad-eyed streets and radiant gatherings

Where I drank deep the bliss of being young,

The strife and sweet potential flux of things

I sought Youth's dream of happiness among!

It walks here aureoled with the city-light,

Forever through the myriad-featured mass

Flaunting not far its fugitive embrace, -- -

Heard sometimes in a song across the night,

Caught in a perfume from the crowds that pass,

And when love yields to love seen face to face.

Alan Seeger

Sonnet VII

TO ME, a pilgrim on that journey bound

Whose stations Beauty's bright examples are,

As of a silken city famed afar

Over the sands for wealth and holy ground,

Came the report of one -- - a woman crowned

With all perfection, blemishless and high,

As the full moon amid the moonlit sky,

With the world's praise and wonder clad around.

And I who held this notion of success:

To leave no form of Nature's loveliness

Unworshipped, if glad eyes have access there, -- -

Beyond all earthly bounds have made my goal

To find where that sweet shrine is and extol

The hand that triumphed in a work so fair.

Alan Seeger

Sonnet VIII

Oft as by chance, a little while apart

The pall of empty, loveless hours withdrawn,

Sweet Beauty, opening on the impoverished heart,

Beams like the jewel on the breast of dawn:

Not though high heaven should rend would deeper awe

Fill me than penetrates my spirit thus,

Nor all those signs the Patmian prophet saw

Seem a new heaven and earth so marvelous;

But, clad thenceforth in iridescent dyes,

The fair world glistens, and in after days

The memory of kind lips and laughing eyes

Lives in my step and lightens all my face, -- -

So they who found the Earthly Paradise

Still breathed, returned, of that sweet, joyful place.

Alan Seeger

Sonnet IX

AMID the florid multitude her face

Was like the full moon seen behind the lace

Of orchard boughs where clouded blossoms part

When Spring shines in the world and in the heart.

As the full-moon-beams to the ferny floor

Of summer woods through flower and foliage pour,

So to my being's innermost recess

Flooded the light of so much loveliness;

She held as in a vase of priceless ware

The wine that over arid ways and bare

My youth was the pathetic thirsting for,

And where she moved the veil of Nature grew

Diaphanous and that radiance mantled through

Which, when I see, I tremble and adore.

Alan Seeger

Sonnet X

A SPLENDOR, flamelike, born to be pursued,

With palms extent for amorous charity

And eyes incensed with love for all they see,

A wonder more to be adored than wooed,

On whom the grace of conscious womanhood

Adorning every little thing she does

Sits like enchantment, making glorious

A careless pose, a casual attitude;

Around her lovely shoulders mantle-wise

Hath come the realm of those old fabulous queens

Whose storied loves are Art's rich heritage,

To keep alive in this our latter age

That force that moving through sweet Beauty's means

Lifts up Man's soul to towering enterprise.

Alan Seeger

Sonnet XI

A paraphrase of Petrarca, Quando fra l'altre donne . . .



WHEN among creatures fair of countenance

Love comes enformed in such proud character,

So far as other beauty yields to her,

So far the breast with fiercer longing pants;

I bless the spot, and hour, and circumstance,

That wed desire to a thing so high,

And say, Glad soul, rejoice, for thou and I

Of bliss unpaired are made participants;

Hence have come ardent thoughts and waking dreams

That, feeding Fancy from so sweet a cup,

Leave it no lust for gross imaginings.

Through her the woman's perfect beauty gleams

That while it gazes lifts the spirit up

To that high source from which all beauty springs.

Alan Seeger

Sonnet XII

LIKE as a dryad, from her native bole

Coming at dusk, when the dim stars emerge,

To a slow river at whose silent verge

Tall poplars tremble and deep grasses roll,

Come thou no less and, kneeling in a shoal

Of the freaked flag and meadow buttercup,

Bend till thine image from the pool beam up

Arched with blue heaven like an aureole.

See how adorable in fancy then

Lives the fair face it mirrors even so,

O thou whose beauty moving among men

Is like the wind's way on the woods below,

Filling all nature where its pathway lies

With arms that supplicate and trembling sighs.

Alan Seeger

Sonnet XIII

I FANCIED, while you stood conversing there,

Superb, in every attitude a queen,

Her ermine thus Boadicea bare,

So moved amid the multitude Faustine.

My life, whose whole religion Beauty is,

Be charged with sin if ever before yours

A lesser feeling crossed my mind than his

Who owning grandeur marvels and adores.

Nay, rather in my dream-world's ivory tower

I made your image the high pearly sill,

And mounting there in many a wistful hour,

Burdened with love, I trembled and was still,

Seeing discovered from that azure height

Remote, untrod horizons of delight.

Alan Seeger

Sonnet XIV

IT MAY be for the world of weeds and tares

And dearth in Nature of sweet Beauty's rose

That oft as Fortune from ten thousand shows

One from the train of Love's true courtiers

Straightway on him who gazes, unawares,

Deep wonder seizes and swift trembling grows,

Reft by that sight of purpose and repose,

Hardly its weight his fainting breast upbears.

Then on the soul from some ancestral place

Floods back remembrance of its heavenly birth,

When, in the light of that serener sphere,

It saw ideal beauty face to face

That through the forms of this our meaner Earth

Shines with a beam less steadfast and less clear.

Alan Seeger

Sonnet XV

ABOVE the ruin of God's holy place,

Where man-forsaken lay the bleeding rood,

Whose hands, when men had craved substantial food,

Gave not, nor folded when they cried, Embrace,

I saw exalted in the latter days

Her whom west winds with natal foam bedewed,

Wafted toward Cyprus, lily-breasted, nude,

Standing with arms out-stretched and flower-like face.

And, sick with all those centuries of tears

Shed in the penance for factitious woe,

Once more I saw the nations at her feet,

For Love shone in their eyes, and in their ears

Come unto me, Love beckoned them, for lo!

The breast your lips abjured is still as sweet.

Alan Seeger

Sonnet XVI

WHO shall invoke her, who shall be her priest,

With single rites the common debt to pay?

On some green headland fronting to the East

Our fairest boy shall kneel at break of day.

Naked, uplifting in a laden tray

New milk and honey and sweet-tinctured wine,

Not without twigs of clustering apple-spray

To wreath a garland for Our Lady's shrine.

The morning planet poised above the sea

Shall drop sweet influence through her drowsing lid;

Dew-drenched, his delicate virginity

Shall scarce disturb the flowers he kneels amid,

That, waked so lightly, shall lift up their eyes,

Cushion his knees, and nod between his thighs.

Alan Seeger