With the sweet wine of France that concentrates
When cheeks are flushed, and glasses gilt and pearled We helped to hold the lines along the Aisne. Hearts worthy of the honor and the trial, Where fell the long-planned blow and fell in vain. There where, firm links in the unyielding chain, There where the watchlights on the winter hillsįlickered like balefire through inclement nights The blast that maims, the hurricane that kills There where we faced under those frowning heights There we drained deeper the deep cup of life,Īfter soft things, the terrible and stern, More than dull Peace or its poor votaries could, With those who, championing another's good, Where like sere leaves lay strewn September's dead,
Ĭraonne, before thy cannon-swept plateau, The power to thrill like a far trumpet-note,. The rumble of far battles in the night, -īorne from red fields whose martial names have won He heard, like distant thunder, growl and grow With the pale rockets' intermittent light, That kinship with the stars that only War Gleamed on our bayonets pointing to the north.Īnd the lone sentinel would start and soar Perseus, the Twins, Orion, the Great Bear. The winter constellations blazing forth. Or light snows fell that made forlorner still In rain, and fog that on the withered hillįroze before dawn, the lurking foe drew down Traced the wide curve of the close-grappling lines.
In the stark branches of the riven pines,īlurred the white rockets that from dusk till morn Winter came down on us, but no man swerved. In the chill trenches, harried, shelled, entombed, What, dying, they reconquered, we preserved, The charge her heroes left us, we assumed, Where the flood-tide of France's early gain,īig with wrecked promise and abandoned hopes,īroke in a surf of blood along the Aisne. Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France.Introduction and Conclusion of a Long Poem.At the Tomb of Napoleon Before the Elections in America - November, 1912.To England at the Outbreak of the Balkan War.Written in a Volume of the Comtesse de Noailles.With a Copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets on Leaving College.When Spring brings back blue days and fair. When Spring comes back with rustling shade He died in heroic action at the Battle of the Somme, just weeks after writing his prophetic poem. It was written in 1916 by Alan Seeger-a patriotic Harvard graduate who volunteered to fight for the French in the early days of WWI, before America had entered the war. The incomparably beautiful poem reference by President Macron.
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