Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/247

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It may be he shall take my hand

And lead me into his dark land

And close my eyes and quench my breath—

It may be I shall pass him still.

I have a rendezvous with Death

On some scarred slope of battered hill,

When Spring comes round again this year

And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep

Pillowed in silk and scented down,

Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep

Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,

Where hushed awakenings are dear. ..

But I've a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town,

When Spring trips north again this year,

And I to my pledged word am true.

I shall not fail that rendezvous. Alan Seeger

CHAMPAGNE, 1914—15

N the glad revels, in the happy fêtes,

When cheeks are flushed, and glasses gilt and pearled

With the sweet wine of France that concentrates

The sunshine and the beauty of the world,

Drink sometimes, you whose footsteps yet may tread

The undisturbed, delightful paths of Earth,

To those whose blood, in pious duty shed,

Hallows the soil where that same wine had birth.

Here, by devoted comrades laid away,

Along our lines they slumber where they fell,

Beside the crater at the Ferme d'Alger

And up the bloody slopes of La Pompelle,