Alan Seeger

The Need to Love

The need to love that all the stars obey
    Entered my heart and banished all beside.
Bare were the gardens where I used to stray;
    Faded the flowers that one time satisfied.

Before the beauty of the west on fire,
    The moonlit hills from cloister-casements viewed,
Cloud-like arose the image of desire,
    And cast out peace and maddened solitude.

I sought the City and the hopes it held:
    With smoke and brooding vapors intercurled,
As the thick roofs and walls close-paralleled
    Shut out the fair horizons of the world —

A truant from the fields and rustic joy,
    In my changed thought that image even so
Shut out the gods I worshipped as a boy
    And all the pure delights I used to know.

Often the veil has trembled at some tide
    Of lovely reminiscence and revealed
How much of beauty Nature holds beside
    Sweet lips that sacrifice and arms that yield:

Clouds, window-framed, beyond the huddled eaves
    When summer cumulates their golden chains,
Or from the parks the smell of burning leaves,
    Fragrant of childhood in the country lanes,

An organ-grinder's melancholy tune
    In rainy streets, or from an attic sill
The blue skies of a windy afternoon
    Where our kites climbed once from some grassy hill:

And my soul once more would be wrapped entire
    In the pure peace and blessing of those years
Before the fierce infection of Desire
    Had ravaged all the flesh. Through starting tears

Shone that lost Paradise; but, if it did,
    Again ere long the prison-shades would fall
That Youth condemns itself to walk amid,
    So narrow, but so beautiful withal.

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;

And aught the world contends for to mine eye
    Seemed not so real a meaning of success
As only once to clasp before I die
    My vision of embodied happiness.