Eudaemon by , Alan Seeger had only a short life. He was an idealist with, some might say, an unrealistically romantic view of death. He wrote a poem, which has become his most famous piece of work, called I Have a Rendezvous with Death. We will never know if he really and truly believed these words at the time that he wrote it but one has to assume that he did.
There is a certain eerie coincidence in the fact that this poem was a favourite of John F Kennedy. His wife Jackie memorised it word for word. It’s an intriguing thought but maybe President Kennedy also had a similar premonition to that of Seeger regarding an early death.
Eudaemon by Alan Seeger
O happiness, I know not what far seas,
Blue hills and deep, thy sunny realms surround,
That thus in Music’s wistful harmonies
And concert of sweet sound
A rumor steals, from some uncertain shore,
Of lovely things outworn or gladness yet in store:
Whether thy beams be pitiful and come,
Across the sundering of vanished years,
From childhood and the happy fields of home,
Like eyes instinct with tears
Felt through green brakes of hedge and apple-bough
Round haunts delightful once, desert and silent now;
Or yet if prescience of unrealized love
Startle the breast with each melodious air,
And gifts that gentle hands are donors of
Still wait intact somewhere,
Furled up all golden in a perfumed place
Within the folded petals of forthcoming days.
Only forever, in the old unrest
Of winds and waters and the varying year,
A litany from islands of the blessed
Answers, Not here . . . not here!
And over the wide world that wandering cry
Shall lead my searching heart unsoothed until I die.
