The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Poetry - 98. Alan Seeger to Jack Reed

.

One of the most interesting Gay partnerships in early 20th century America formed between two college boys who were destined for separate glory. After graduation, Seeger and John Reed relocated as a couple to Greenwich Village, where they became struggling poets. Both had success in print, but Seeger left Reed to move to Paris, breaking the man's heart and assuring Reed wrote almost no poetry afterwards, Instead, he became a journalist, activist, and eventually, the only American buried in the Kremlin wall. Seeger went on to be nearly forgotten, until JFK's Gay bestie from college introduced his work to the younger man. Kennedy openly recited Seeger's work and was always ready to state he was the President's favorite. This renewed interest in Seeger's work made him famous overnight.

No doubt questioning his decision to leave John, here are a selection of Alan Seeger's love Sonnets from Paris.

from The Paris Sonnets

Sonnet III

There was a youth around whose early way

White angels hung in converse and sweet choir,

Teaching in summer clouds his thought to stray –

In cloud and far horizon to desire.

His life was nursed in beauty, like the stream

Born of clear showers and the mountain dew,

Close under snow-clad summits where they gleam

Forever pure against heaven’s orient blue.

Within the city’s shades he walked at last.

Faint and more faint in sad recessional

Down the dim corridors of Time outworn,

A chorus ebbed from that forsaken past,

A hymn of glories fled beyond recall

With the lost heights and splendor of life’s morn.

Sonnet IV

Up at his attic sill the South wind came

And days of sun and storm but never peace.

Along the town's tumultuous arteries

He heard the heart-throbs of a sentient frame:

Each night the whistles in the bay, the same

Whirl of incessant wheels and clanging cars:

For smoke that half obscured, the circling stars

Burnt like his youth with but a sickly flame.

Up to his attic came the city cries –

The throes with which her iron sinews heave –

And yet forever behind prison doors

Welled in his heart and trembled in his eyes

The light that hangs on desert hills at eve

And tints the sea on solitary shores. . . .

Sonnet V

A tide of beauty with returning May

Floods the fair city; from warm pavements fume

Odors endeared; down avenues in bloom

The chestnut-trees with phallic spires are gay.

Over the terrace flows the thronged café;

The boulevards are streams of hurrying sound;

And through the streets, like veins when they abound,

The lust for pleasure throbs itself away.

Here let me live, here let me still pursue

Phantoms of bliss that beckon and recede –

Thy strange allurements, City that I love,

Maze of romance, where I have followed too

The dream Youth treasures of its dearest need

And stars beyond thy towers bring tidings of.

Sonnet VI

Give me the treble of thy horns and hoofs,

The ponderous undertones of 'bus and tram,

A garret and a glimpse across the roofs

Of clouds blown eastward over Notre Dame,

The glad-eyed streets and radiant gatherings

Where I drank deep the bliss of being young,

The strife and sweet potential flux of things

I sought Youth's dream of happiness among!

It walks here aureoled with the city-light,

Forever through the myriad-featured mass

Flaunting not far its fugitive embrace –

Heard sometimes in a song across the night,

Caught in a perfume from the crowds that pass,

And when love yields to love seen face to face.

Sonnet Xll

Like as a dryad, from her native bole

Coming at dusk, when the dim stars emerge,

To a slow river at whose silent verge

Tall poplars tremble and deep grasses roll,

Come thou no less and, kneeling in a shoal

Of the freaked flag and meadow buttercup,

Bend till thine image from the pool beam up

Arched with blue heaven like an aureole.

See how adorable in fancy then

Lives the fair face it mirrors even so,

O thou whose beauty moving among men

Is like the wind's way on the woods below,

Filling all nature where its pathway lies

With arms that supplicate and trembling sighs.

Alan Seeger,[i]

1912