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Poems by Alan Seeger.
He loved New York; he loved Paris; he loved any city because youth and
life and romance and love were there. He drank all of these into his
soul like a thirsty desert drinks rain; to spring to flowers and life
and color again. He drank of life and youth as a flower drinks of dew,
or a bird at a city fountain, with fluttering joy, drinks, singing as
it drinks. You feel all of that eagerness in "Sonnet VI" where he says:
"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!"
Poems by Alan Seeger.
THE SONG OF BEAUTY
And closely akin to Youth always is Beauty. Beauty and Youth walk arm
in arm everywhere, and one may even go so far as to say anywhere. Youth
cares not where he goes as long as Beauty walks beside him. He will
walk to the ends of the earth. Indeed, he prefers the long way home.
Anybody who has known both Youth and Beauty knows this, and it need not
be argued about much, thank God. And so it is most natural to find this
young poet singing the lyric of Beauty even as he sings the lyric of
Youth. How understandingly he addresses Beauty, and how reverently in
"An Ode to Natural Beauty"!
"Spirit of Beauty, whose sweet impulses,
Flung like the rose of dawn across the sea,
Alone can flush the exalted consciousness
With shafts of sensible divinity,
Light of the World, essential loveliness.
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