Poems | Page 8

and sunny spires ablaze,
And burnished domes half seen through luminous haze. Lo, with what
opportunity earth teems! How like a fair its ample beauty seems!
Fluttering with flags its proud pavilions rise: What bright bazaars, what
marvellous merchandise, Down seething alleys what melodious din,
What clamor, importuning from every booth: At Earth's great mart
where Joy is trafficked in Buy while thy purse yet swells with golden
Youth!
Into this fair he sallied forth, not as one to the manner born, but with
the eagerness of a traveller from a far country, who feels as though he
were living in a dream. His attitude to the whole experience is
curiously ingenuous, but perfectly sane and straightforward. It is the
Paris of Murger in which he lives, not the Paris of Baudelaire and the
Second Empire. He takes his experiences lightly. There is no sign
either of any struggle of the soul or of any very rending tempest of the
heart. There is no posing, self-conscious Byronism, nor any of that
morbid dallying with the idea of "sin" which gives such an unpleasant
flavor to a good deal of romantic poetry, both French and English.

There are traces of disappointment and disillusion, but they are
accepted without a murmur as inevitable incidents of a great, absorbing
experience. All this means, of course, that there is no tragic depth, and
little analytic subtlety, in these poems. They are the work of a young
man enamoured of his youth, enthusiastically grateful for the gift of life,
and entirely at his ease within his own moral code. He had known none
of what he himself calls "that kind of affliction which alone can unfold
the profundities of the human spirit."
It was in Paris that he produced most of the "Juvenilia". He included
only a few of the pieces which he had written at Harvard and in New
York. Thus all, or nearly all, the poems ranged under that title, are, as
he said -- Relics of the time when I too fared Across the sweet fifth
lustrum of my days.
Paris, however, did not absorb him entirely during these years. He
would occasionally set forth on long tramps through the French
provinces; for he loved every aspect of that gracious country. He once
spent some weeks with a friend in Switzerland; but this experience
seems to have left no trace in his work.
Then came the fateful year 1914. His "Juvenilia" having grown to a
passable bulk, he brought them in the early summer to London, with a
view to finding a publisher for them; but it does not appear that he took
any very active steps to that effect. His days were mainly spent in the
British Museum, and his evenings with a coterie of friends at the Cafe
Royal. In the middle of July, his father came to England and spent a
week with him. Of this meeting Mr. Seeger writes:
== We passed three days at Canterbury -- three days of such intimacy
as we had hardly had since he was a boy in Mexico. For four or five
years I had only seen him a few days at a time, during my hurried visits
to the United States. We explored the old town together, heard services
in the Cathedral, and had long talks in the close. After service in the
Cathedral on a Monday morning, the last of our stay at Canterbury,
Alan was particularly enthusiastic over the reading of the Psalms, and
said "Was there ever such English written as that of the Bible?" I said
good-bye to Alan on July 25th. ==
Two days earlier, the Austrian Ultimatum had been presented to Serbia;
on that very day the time limit expired, the Serbian reply was rejected,
and the Austrian Minister left Belgrade. The wheels of fate were

already whirling.
As soon as it became evident that a European war was inevitable Alan
returned to Paris. He took Bruges on his way, and there left the
manuscript of his poems in the keeping of a printer, not foreseeing the
risks to which he was thus exposing them.
The war was not three weeks old when, along with forty or fifty of his
fellow-countrymen, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion of France. Why
did he take this step? Fundamentally, no doubt, because he felt war to
be one of the supreme experiences of life, from which, when it offered
itself, he could not shrink without disloyalty to his ideal. Long before
the war was anything more than a vague possibility, he had imagined
the time . . . when courted Death shall claim my limbs and find them
Laid in some desert place alone, or where the tides Of war's tumultuous
waves on the wet sands behind them Leave rifts