two years, they went back to the United States to school, they were already familiar with Mexican nature and life; and they kept their impressions fresh by frequent vacation visits. It must have been a delightful experience to slip down every now and then to the tropics: first to pass under the pink walls of Morro Castle into the wide lagoon of Havana; then to cross the Spanish Main to Vera Cruz; then, after skirting the giant escarpment of Orizaba, to crawl zigzagging up the almost precipitous ascent that divides the tierra templada from the tierra fria; and finally to speed through the endless agave-fields of the upland haciendas, to Mexico City and home.
Mexico, and the experiences associated with it, have left deep marks on Alan Seeger's poetry. The vacation voyages thither speak in this apostrophe from the "Ode to Antares":
Star of the South that now through orient mist
At nightfall off Tampico or Belize
Greetest the sailor, rising from those seas
Where first in me, a fond romanticist,
The tropic sunset's bloom on cloudy piles
Cast out industrious cares with dreams of fabulous isles....
The longest of his poems, "The Deserted Garden"—a veritable gallery of imaginative landscape—is entirely Mexican in colouring. Indeed we may conjecture without too much rashness that it is a mere expansion of the sonnet entitled "Tezcotzinco," the fruit of a solitary excursion to the ruins of Nezahualcoyotl's baths, in the hills beyond Tezcoco. But even where there is no painting of definite Mexican scenes, motives from the vast uplands with their cloud pageantry, and from the palm-fringed, incandescent coasts, frequently recur in his verse. For
xviii
