Poems | Page 5

garnering impressions and experiences to think of

co-ordinating and interpreting them. That would have come later; and
later, too, would have come a general deepening of the spiritual content
of his work. There had been nothing in either his outward or his inward
life that could fairly be called suffering or struggle. He had not sounded
the depths of human experience, which is as much as to say that neither
had he risen to the heights. This he no doubt recognised himself, and
was not thinking merely of the date of composition when he called his
pre-war poems "Juvenilia". Great emotions, and perhaps great sorrows,
would have come to him in due time, and would have deepened and
enriched his vein of song. The first great emotion which found him,
when he rallied to the trumpet-call of France and freedom, did, as a
matter of fact, lend new reality and poignancy to his verse; but the
soldier's life left him small leisure for composition. We must regard his
work, then, as a fragment, a mere foretaste of what he might have
achieved had his life been prolonged. But, devoted though he was to his
art, he felt that to live greatly is better than to write greatly. The
unfulfilment of his poetic hopes and dreams meant the fulfilment of a
higher ambition.
Alan Seeger was born in New York on June 22nd, 1888. His father and
his mother belonged to old New England families.
When he was a year old his parents removed to Staten Island, which
forms, as it were, the stopper to the bottle of New York harbour. There
he remained until his tenth year, growing up along with a brother and a
sister, the one a little older, the other a little younger, than himself.
From their home on the heights of Staten Island, the children looked
out day by day upon one of the most romantic scenes in the world -- the
gateway to the Western Hemisphere. They could see the great
steamships of all the nations threading their way through the Narrows
and passing in procession up the glorious expanse of New York Bay, to
which the incessant local traffic of tug-boats, river steamers and huge
steam-ferries lent an ever-shifting animation. In the foreground lay
Robbins Reef Lighthouse, in the middle distance the Statue of Liberty,
in the background the giant curves of Brooklyn Bridge, and, range over
range, the mountainous buildings of "down town" New York -- not
then as colossal as they are to-day, but already unlike anything else
under the sun. And the incoming stream of tramps and liners met the
outgoing stream which carried the imagination seaward, to the islands

of the buccaneers, and the haunts of all the heroes and villains of
history, in the Old World. The children did not look with incurious eyes
upon this stirring scene. They knew the names of all the great European
liners and of the warships passing to and from the Navy Yard; and the
walls of their nursery were covered with their drawings of the shipping,
rude enough, no doubt, but showing accurate observation of such
details as funnels, masts and rigging. They were of an age, before they
left Staten Island, to realize something of the historic implications of
their environment.
In 1898 the family returned to New York, and there Alan continued at
the Horace Mann School the education begun at the Staten Island
Academy. The great delight of the ten-year-old schoolboy was to
follow the rushing fire-engines which were an almost daily feature in
the life of the New York streets. Even in manhood he could never resist
the lure of the fire-alarm.
Two years later (1900) came a new migration, which no doubt
exercised a determining influence on the boy's development. The
family removed to Mexico, and there Alan spent a great part of the
most impressionable years of his youth. If New York embodies the
romance of Power, Mexico represents to perfection the romance of
Picturesqueness. To pass from the United States to Mexico is like
passing at one bound from the New World to the Old. Wherever it has
not been recently Americanized, its beauty is that of sunbaked,
somnolent decay. It is in many ways curiously like its mother -- or
rather its step-mother -- country, Spain. But Spain can show nothing to
equal the spacious magnificence of its scenery or the picturesqueness of
its physiognomies and its costumes. And then it is the scene of the most
fascinating adventure recorded in history -- an exploit which puts to
shame the imagination of the greatest masters of romance. It is true that
the Mexico City of to-day shows scanty traces (except in its Museum)
of the Tenochtitlan of Montezuma; but the vast amphitheatre on which
it stands