Poet Alan Seeger wrote of a “rendezvous with death,” and, indeed, death did come to meet him at Belloy-en-Santerre July 4, 1916. An American citizen, he was serving in the French Foreign Legion during World War I, in the years before the United States entered the war.
But before all that happened, Seeger (uncle to Pete Seeger) had a rendezvous with Dublin. Tom Hyman writes about it in “Village on a Hill: A History of Dublin, New Hampshire, 1752-2000.”
Hyman quotes Barbara Ball Buff in telling the story of Seeger’s arrival in town: “Reserved almost to the point of mystery, Seeger appeared on foot one day looking for a friends who was supposedly working in Dublin. A farmer who offered him a ride deposited him with the Thayers, explaining that the unconventionally dressed Seeger, ‘with masses of dark hair and a tired face,’ ‘looked like one of you’n.’”
The you’n in question, the Thayers, referred to the family of the painter Abbott Thayer, one of the artists of the Dublin Art Colony. Thayer’s wife, Kate, sent Seeger along to the home of George deForest Brush, another painter, who was looking for a tutor for his youngest children.
Seeger spent the summer of 1911 with the family. He stayed with Brush’s daughter, Nancy, and her husband, Robert Pearmain, helping them build a cottage. He also tutored Brush’s younger children, Jane, Thea and Mary.
Seeger’s story begins long before his appearance in Dublin, of course.
Born in 1888 in New York City, Seeger grew up on Staten Island until the age of 12, when his family moved to Mexico City, according to the website Poetry of the First World War (www.scuttlebuttsmallchow.com/alansee2.html). Two years later, he enrolled in boarding school in Tarrytown, N.Y., but continued to spend his summers in Mexico. In 1906, he entered Harvard University, where his classmates included T.S. Eliot and John Reed.
He studied Celtic literature, and graduated with honors in 1910, after which he headed for New York City’s Greenwich Village and the Bohemian life. He lived there for two years (with the exception of the summer spent in Dublin) in the company of writers and artists and radicals, writing poetry. Then, he made his way to the Left Bank of Paris, where he found similar ex-patriot types.
In August 1914, when the war was only a few weeks old, he joined the French Foreign Legion. A few months later he wrote this, in a letter to the New Republic:
I have talked with so many of the young volunteers here. Their case is little known, even by the French, yet altogether interesting and appealing. They are foreigners on whom the outbreak of war laid no formal compulsion. But they had stood on the butte in springtime perhaps, as Julian and Louise stood, and looked out over the myriad twinkling lights of the beautiful city. Paris mystic, maternal, personified, to whom they owed the happiest moments of their lives — Paris was in peril. Were they not under a moral obligation, no less binding than [that by which] their comrades were bound, legally, to put their breasts between her and destruction? Without renouncing their nationality, they had yet chosen to make their homes here beyond any other city in the world. Did not the benefits and blessings they had received point them a duty that heart and conscience could not deny?
Seeger’s letters and journal entries, later published in book form, are considered among the most complete records of life in the French Foreign Legion. One, written to George deForest Brush and printed in the Dublin town history, looks back on his summer in the shadow of Monadnock:
Your long letters describing all the little incidents of your life reach me and give me the greatest pleasure. Do you really walk in the old places where we used to stroll together and think of me? I remember the way I used to wander about there and look always into the eastern sky. And then that last walk over the Peterboro hills into the rising moon! It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life. I used to dream that it was love and visionary happiness that awaited me behind those pale distances of blue evening skies. But perhaps it was …! We are to attack in a few days and be in the thick of one of the most tremendous actions in all History. It is my place here and I would not for the world be anywhere else. If I fall, it will be a fitting climax to my career, — the most perfect that I could wish.
Seeger did fall, during a charge, and, the Poetry of the First World War website says, “is reported to have sung a patriotic song to urge on his comrades as he bled to death.”
His poem, “Rendezvous with Death,” became one of the most famous of the war, and his poetry was gathered into a collection in 1917, about which his Harvard classmate T.S. Eliot wrote, “Seeger was serious about his work and spent pains over it. The work is well done, and so much out of date as to be almost a positive quality. It is high-flown, heavily decorated and solemn, but its solemnity is thorough going, not a mere literary formality. Alan Seeger, as one who knew him can attest, lived his whole life on this plane, with impeccable poetic dignity; everything about him was in keeping.”
A Look Back originally appeared in the May 11, 2006 edition of the Monadnock Ledger.