An American legionnaire foresees his death – An Irishman’s Diary about Alan Seeger

Like WB Yeats's Irish Airman, Alan Seeger foresaw his own demise in war. But unlike the airman (Robert Gregory, whose imagined thoughts Yeats reconstructed in verse), Seeger was a poet as well as soldier. So he made the prophesy himself, in his best-known work, I Have a Rendezvous with Death:

“I have a rendezvous with death/At some disputed barricade,/When Spring comes back with rustling shade/And apple blossoms fill the air/I have a rendezvous with Death/When spring brings back blue days and fair.”

In the event, it was early summer, not spring, when the rendezvous happened. Fighting with the French Foreign Legion at the Somme, the young American, just turned 28, was part of a unit attacking the German stronghold of Belloy-en-Santerre when he was hit by at least six explosive machine gun bullets.

Bayonet

He survived long enough to strip off his jacket and shirt, dress his own wounds, and then plant his rifle-bayonet in the ground, alerting stretcher bearers to the presence of a wounded man. But they found him too late and he is presumed to have kept his date with death some time on the Fourth of July, 1916.

Eye-witnesses recalled that he had cheered his comrades on even as he fell, and an Irish fellow legionnaire, John Barrett, found this in keeping with Seeger’s character: “They say he was utterly indifferent to the hail of lead and steel. He died as he lived [...] Often I think of his cheery smile, as he advanced against the German guns, which he simply despised.”

WB Yeats probably never met Seeger, but his father knew him well. The then 70-year-old John Butler Yeats had travelled to New York in 1908 for what was supposed to be two weeks and instead spent the remaining 13 years of his life there.

During that time, he used to hold court in a restaurant called Petitpas, on West 29th Street, where a group of young artists and writers, including Seeger, were entranced by his conversational brilliance.

Another of the circle, Van Wyck Brooks, admitted that part of the attraction was the old painter's connection with his more famous son. John B was not too pleased. Once, hearing himself referred to as "the father of the great Yeats", he declared angrily: "I am the great Yeats".

But paid due deference, as a biographer of Van Wyck Brooks has written, he would happily enlarge on the Irish literary renaissance, telling stories of Synge and George Moore and Dunsany, and chanting WB’s poems, while his listeners sat “in rapt attention”.

Seeger did not publish his work while alive. When a posthumous collection appeared in 1917, John B admitted in a letter to his son that he “did not suspect [Seeger] of poetry”, but had been very struck by his personality.

He was anxious to know what WB made of the work. And whether Yeats jnr expressed an opinion, I don’t know. TS Eliot did, favourably, although his review has to be filtered through the knowledge that they had been friends in Harvard and that Seeger was a dead hero by then.

Even Eliot admitted that the poems' style was a bit old-fashioned and florid. Some, like his sonnet To England at the Outbreak of the Balkan War seem doubly-dated now, since their romantic language is matched by simplistic ideas about honour that would not survive the mass slaughter about to unfold.

The romance must have been wearing thin by July 1916. Even so, in his last letter, Seeger showed no self-doubt. He was looking forward to the imminent attack, and to being part of the first wave. “The supreme experience,” he called it

I Have a Rendezvous with Death became, adding to its poignancy, a favourite poem of John F Kennedy.

Of course, by the time of JFK’s tragic end, a new generation of Seegers had risen to fame, including the musicians Pete, Peggy, and Mike – all children of Alan’s brother Charles, and all known for their pacifism.

This seems ironic, although it probably isn’t. Their uncle’s experiences were part of what informed their very different world view, after all.

In any case, the earlier Seeger's attitude to war is still enshrined in Paris, where he lived before joining the French Foreign Legion. He was the model for a statue of an American in French uniform at the Place des États-Unis – arm upraised, holding his cap. The monument is accompanied by another of his poems, also prophetic – Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France.