Page:Poems, Alan Seeger, 1916.djvu/18

 optimism. It is not the result of a balancing of good and ill, and a reasoned decision that good preponderates. Rather it is a direct perception, an intuition, of the beauty and wonder of the universe—an intuition too overpowering to be seriously disturbed by the existence of pain and evil, some of which, at any rate, has its value as a foil, a background, to joy. This was the message—not a philosophy but an irresistible emotion—which he sought to deliver through the medium of an art which he seriously studied and deeply loved. It spoke from the very depths of his being, and the poems in which it found utterance, whatever their purely literary qualities, have at least the value of a first-hand human document, the sincere self-portraiture of a vivid and virile soul.

There are three more or less clearly-marked elements in a poet's equipment—observation, passion, reflection, or in simpler terms, seeing, feeling and thinking. The first two are richly represented in the following poems, the third, as was natural, much less so. The poet was too fully occupied in garnering impressions and experiences to think of co-ordinating and interpreting them. That would have come later; and later, too, would have come a general deepening of the spiritual content of his work. There had been nothing in either his outward or his inward life that could fairly be called suffering or struggle. He had not sounded the depths of human experience, which is as much as to say that neither had he risen to the heights. This he no doubt recognised himself, and was not thinking merely of the date of composition when he called his pre-war poems "Juvenilia." Great emotions, and perhaps great sorrows, would have come to him in due time, and would have deepened and enriched his vein of song. The first great emotion which found him, when he rallied to the trumpet-call of France xiv