The power that shaped the strife shall end the strife;
Then let's bow down before the Unknown Will;
Fight on, believing all is well with life;
Seeing within the worst of War's red rage
The gleam, the glory of the Golden Age."
ALAN SEEGER was the embodiment of all that is best in life; a man of high vitality and an overflowing joy in existence; a man keen for great experiences and high and noble adventure, which discovers itself again and again in all he has written. In a sonnet, written two months before his death, he has given us a personal picture, which greatly endears him to us:
I frolicked, poor of purse, but light of heart.
And lived in strict devotion all along
To my three idols—Love and Arms and Song."
He was a vivid and virile soul, alive to the beauty and wonder of the universe, who accepted life as a glorious gift and with joy lived it out to the fullest.
It has been said of him, that, "of all the poets who have died young, none has died so happily;" and when we remember the sad and disappointing lives of Keats, and Shelley, and of Byron, we cannot but feel that this is true; for he died, as he would have wished to die, for the country whose cause he had espoused, in the heat of conflict and in the moment of victory.
His "Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France," which he was to have read before the statutes of Lafayette and of Washington in Paris,
