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There were men like Alan Seeger, who chanced to be in Europe when war broke out; many of these joined up with the nearest fighting units. "I have a rendezvous with death," were Alan Seeger's last words as he fell mortally wounded between the French and German trenches.
Since I have summoned myself as a witness I take the stand once more to confess that Alan Seeger's lofty lyric, 'I have a rendezvous with Death' has a diminished appeal because of the foreign connotations of 'rendezvous'. The French noun was adopted into English more than three centuries ago; and it was used as a verb nearly three centuries ago; it does not interfere with the current of sympathy when I find it in the prose of Scott and of Mark Twain.
After four years, I should put at the head of all the immense number of verses inspired by the war John Masefield's August 1914, Alan Seeger's I Have a Rendezvous with Death, and Rupert Brooke's The Soldier; and of all the poems written by men actually fighting, I should put Alan Seeger's first.
"I do, son; I do! Even Mannie should have his share of good-bye." To Gina Berg: "They want me to play that little setting of mine of Allan Seeger's poem, 'I have a rendezvous." "It it's beautiful, Leon! I was to have sung it on my program to-night only, I'm afraid you had better not " "Please, Leon! Nothing you play can ever make me as sad as it makes me glad.
I do not mean to reflect in any way upon Alan Seeger's beautiful poem. Who can doubt that it is a sincere, as well as a perfect, expression of a mood common to all young soldiers? Drew was just as sincere in writing his verses, and I put all the feeling I could into my tin-whistle interpretation of "The Minstrel Boy."
Nevertheless, it appears to me unfortunate in Seeger's noble poem, where it forces me to taste its foreign flavour. Another French word, bouquet, is indisputably English; and yet when I find it in Walt Whitman's heartfelt lament for Lincoln, 'O Captain, my Captain', I cannot but feel it to be a blemish:
We came to the front feeling deeply sorry for ourselves, and for all airmen of whatever nationality, whose lives were to be snuffed out in their promising beginnings. I used to play "The Minstrel Boy to the War Has Gone" on a tin flute, and Drew wrote poetry. While we were waiting for our first machine, he composed "The Airman's Rendezvous," written in the manner of Alan Seeger's poem.
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