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 

• Nutting by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• November 1813 by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• November, 1806 by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• My Heart Leaps Up by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Mutability by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Most Sweet it is by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Minstrels by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Michael Angelo In Reply To The Passage Upon His Staute Of Sleeping Night by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Michael: A Pastoral Poem by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Methought I Saw The Footsteps Of A Throne by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Memory by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Memorials Of A Tour Of Scotland, 1803 VI. Glen-Almain, Or, The Narrow Glen by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland, by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland 1814 I. Suggested By A Beautiful Ruin Upon One Of The Islands Of Lo by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland, 1803 by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland, 1803 XIV. Fly, Some Kind Haringer, To Grasmere-Dale by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland, 1803 XII. Yarrow Unvisited by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland, 1803 XII. Sonnet Composed At —- Castle by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
• Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland, 1803 X. Rob Roy’s Grave by William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth

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