I Have a Rendezvous with Death, Oct 3, 2026

Alan Seeger wrote this poem in the shadow of the First World War, and it reads like a quiet appointment calmly kept. The voice doesn't rage against death or beg off it; it simply states the meeting place and time, over and over, the way you'd confirm plans with an old acquaintance. That refrain, "I have a rendezvous with Death," gives the poem its haunting music — formal, almost courtly, set against the brutal facts of "some scarred slope of battered hill." The contrast between spring's apple blossoms and meadow flowers and the battlefield's wreckage is the poem's central ache: life renewing itself while a man walks toward his own ending. The middle stanza, imagining the softer bed he could have chosen instead, makes his constancy feel earned rather than naive. It still lands because it isn't really about war so much as about keeping a promise to something larger than comfort, a theme that outlives any one century's battles.