The Need To Love

A poem by Alan Seeger (1888-1916)

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.

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Poems in English 

• The Giver by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• The Gift by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• The Flight by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• The Faery Forest by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• The Dreams Of My Heart by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• The Crystal Gazer by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• The Coin by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• The Cloud by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• The Carpenter’s Son by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• The Broken Field by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• The Blind by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• The Answer by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• Spring In War Time by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• Soul’s Birth by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• A Song To Eleonora Duse In “Francesca da Rimini ” by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• Song At Capri by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• Since There Is No Escape by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• The Return by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• Pity by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale
• Pierrot’s Song by Sara Teasdale by Sara Teasdale

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