Fame always lures Youth. Perhaps later experience proves that it is
indeed a hollow thing, hardly worth striving for. But to Youth there is
no goal that calls more insistently than Fame. Youth and Beauty and
Fame--how closely akin they are! If Beauty and Fame keep him company,
Youth is next the stars with delight. And so it is natural that this
young poet shall sing the song of Fame with exuberant enthusiasm. He
says in "The Need to Love":
"And I have followed Fame with less devotion,
And kept no real ambition but to see
Rise from the foam of Nature's sunlit ocean
My dream of palpable divinity."
Poems by Alan Seeger.
And while we are listening to the music of these human stars, the music
of the celestial spheres set down in human words, let us catch again
the poetic echo of that third line and let it linger long as we listen,
"Rise from the foam of Nature's sunlit ocean," and
"Forget it not till the crowns are crumbled,
Till the swords of the kings are rent with rust;
Forget it not till the hills lie humbled,
And the Springs of the seas run dust,"
that, as Edwin Markham sings, this echo is the echo of the eternal
poetic music.
With these wondrous lines he answers the question which he himself asks
in "Fragments," "What is Success?"
"Out of the endless ore
Of deep desire to coin the utmost gold
Of passionate memory: to have lived so well
That the fifth moon, when it swims up once more
Through orchard boughs where mating orioles build
And apple trees unfold,
Find not of that dear need that all things tell
The heart unburdened nor the arms unfilled."
Poems by Alan Seeger.
Joy comes next in our treatment of the outstanding singings of this
singing poet, and he himself has given us the connecting link in the
following lines:
"He has drained as well
Joy's perfumed bowl and cried as I have cried:
Be Fame their mistress whom Love passes by."
Poems by Alan Seeger.
And thus smoothly we pass from Fame to Joy and hear him sing of this
fourth high peak of Youth.