I Have A Rendezvous With Death — Jul 5, 2026

Alan Seeger wrote this poem in 1916, while serving with the French Foreign Legion, and it reads like a promise made calmly, almost gently, to something enormous. The tone is quiet rather than dramatic — a soldier speaking of his own death the way one might mention a scheduled meeting, courteous and unafraid. That restraint gives the poem its music: soft rhymes, a lulling refrain of "rendezvous with Death," and recurring images of spring — apple-blossoms, meadow-flowers, blue days — set against battlefields and "scarred slopes." The contrast between new life and violent ending is the poem's real engine. So is the aching middle stanza, where Seeger imagines the ordinary happiness he's forgoing: silk pillows, a lover's breath, "hushed awakenings." It still lands because it isn't really about war so much as about keeping one's word to fate, to duty, to something larger than comfort — a feeling readers recognize even far from any battlefield.