Introduction and Conclusion of a Long Poem By Alan Seeger

     I have gone sometimes by the gates of Death
    And stood beside the cavern through whose doors
    Enter the voyagers into the unseen.
    From that dread threshold only, gazing back,
    Have eyes in swift illumination seen
    Life utterly revealed, and guessed therein
    What things were vital and what things were vain.
    Know then, like a vast ocean from my feet
    Spreading away into the morning sky,
    I saw unrolled my vanished days, and, lo,
    Oblivion like a morning mist obscured
    Toils, trials, ambitions, agitations, ease,
    And like green isles, sun-kissed, with sweet perfume
    Loading the airs blown back from that dim gulf,
    Gleamed only through the all-involving haze
    The hours when we have loved and been beloved.

     Therefore, sweet friends, as often as by Love
    You rise absorbed into the harmony
    Of planets singing round magnetic suns,
    Let not propriety nor prejudice
    Nor the precepts of jealous age deny
    What Sense so incontestably affirms;
    Cling to the blessed moment and drink deep
    Of the sweet cup it tends, as there alone
    Were that which makes life worth the pain to live.
    What is so fair as lovers in their joy
    That dies in sleep, their sleep that wakes in joy?
    Caressing arms are their light pillows. They
    That like lost stars have wandered hitherto
    Lonesome and lightless through the universe,
    Now glow transfired at Nature’s flaming core;
    They are the centre; constellated heaven
    Is the embroidered panoply spread round
    Their bridal, and the music of the spheres
    Rocks them in hushed epithalamium.

         .    .    .    .    .

     I know that there are those whose idle tongues
    Blaspheme the beauty of the world that was
    So wondrous and so worshipful to me.
    I call them those that, in the palace where
    Down perfumed halls the Sleeping Beauty lay,
    Wandered without the secret or the key.
    I know that there are those, of gentler heart,
    Broken by grief or by deception bowed,
    Who in some realm beyond the grave conceive
    The bliss they found not here; but, as for me,
    In the soft fibres of the tender flesh
    I saw potentialities of Joy
    Ten thousand lifetimes could not use. Dear Earth,
    In this dark month when deep as morning dew
    On thy maternal breast shall fall the blood
    Of those that were thy loveliest and thy best,
    If it be fate that mine shall mix with theirs,
    Hear this my natural prayer, for, purified
    By that Lethean agony and clad
    In more resplendent powers, I ask nought else
    Than reincarnate to retrace my path,
    Be born again of woman, walk once more
    Through Childhood’s fragrant, flowery wonderland
    And, entered in the golden realm of Youth,
    Fare still a pilgrim toward the copious joys
    I savored here yet scarce began to sip;
    Yea, with the comrades that I loved so well
    Resume the banquet we had scarce begun
    When in the street we heard the clarion-call
    And each man sprang to arms – ay, even myself
    Who loved sweet Youth too truly not to share
    Its pain no less than its delight. If prayers
    Are to be prayed, lo, here is mine! Be this
    My resurrection, this my recompense!