I Have a Rendezvous with Death by Alan Seeger
Quick answer: I Have a Rendezvous with Death by Alan Seeger, analysed: the refrain, the spring imagery, and the eerie story of the poet who kept his appointment.
The poem's history reads like something a novelist would reject as too neat. Alan Seeger, an American who joined the French Foreign Legion in 1914, wrote 'I Have a Rendezvous with Death' foreseeing his own end in the spring fighting; he was killed at Belloy-en-Santerre on 4 July 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, and the poem appeared in his posthumous collection that year. Decades later John F. Kennedy named it his favourite poem and asked his wife to recite it.
It is the last great war poem of the old, romantic kind, written from inside the trenches yet sounding nothing like Owen or Rosenberg: death not as waste but as an appointment a gentleman keeps.
What the poem says
The speaker announces his rendezvous with Death at some disputed barricade, when spring returns with rustling shade and apple blossom fills the air. The setting is the poem's first shock: the appointment is scheduled not for winter or night but for the season of renewal, and every return of spring will now carry the appointment inside it. Death may take his hand and lead him into a dark land, or pass him by this year; either way the meeting stands.
The final movement makes the choice explicit. God knows, the speaker admits, it were better to be deep among silks and scented pillows, love's hushed awakenings, breath to breath. The alternative life is fully imagined and fully desired. But he has a pledged word, and the poem ends on punctuality as honour: he shall not fail the rendezvous.
How it works: one metaphor, held to the end
The entire poem lives inside a single conceit: death as a social engagement. Rendezvous, the meeting place, the taking of a hand, the pledged word, every element extends the metaphor, and Seeger never once steps outside it to explain or moralise. That discipline is why the poem feels inevitable rather than sentimental. The refrain returns like the appointment itself, each time with the details slightly advanced, a technique any poet working with repetition should study; a refrain that develops rather than repeats is what separates incantation from filler, and it is the kind of structural control that scores well when judges weigh a poem's design, as Writory's do every month.
Formally it runs in easy iambic tetrameter with irregular rhyme, closer to song than sonnet, and the sensuous stanza about silks and sleep exists to be renounced: the poem builds the sweetest possible counter-life so the final fidelity costs everything.
Why it lasts
Partly the poem lasts as a document: its author kept the appointment, and no reader can unknow that. Partly it lasts because it preserves, in amber, the chivalric idea of death that the Somme itself would destroy; read beside Owen's 'Exposure', written barely a year later, it shows a whole worldview dying between two poems, which makes the pair invaluable for teaching. And partly it survives on pure music, the soft spring vowels against the hard consonants of the barricade.
Its afterlife in American public memory, Kennedy above all, shows how a poem of private fatalism can become a nation's vocabulary for sacrifice.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the sustained conceit: choose one social ritual, an appointment, an interview, a dance, a debt, as your metaphor for something enormous, and refuse every temptation to break frame. Steal also the renounced alternative: give the thing your speaker will not choose its full beauty before the refusal. Renunciation only moves the reader when the renounced life was genuinely worth wanting.
What poets can take from this
- Track how each return of the refrain adds or advances one detail.
- Notice death arrives with spring imagery, not winter; reversal of season is the poem's freshest move.
- Hold a single conceit for a whole poem without explaining it once.
- Build the rejected alternative, comfort, love, safety, at full sensory strength.
- Read this beside Owen's Exposure to feel two eras of war poetry in one sitting.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in which a meeting with something abstract, death, failure, forgiveness, your past self, is treated as a formal appointment, with a refrain that returns three times, each time one detail closer.
Questions
What is I Have a Rendezvous with Death about?
A soldier calmly foresees his death in the spring fighting and treats it as an appointment he is honour-bound to keep, even while admitting the sweeter life of love and comfort he would prefer. It reflects Seeger's fatalism as a Foreign Legion volunteer.
Did Alan Seeger really die as the poem predicts?
Yes. Seeger was killed on 4 July 1916 at Belloy-en-Santerre during the Battle of the Somme, in the kind of spring-to-summer assault the poem imagines. The poem was published posthumously the same year.
Why did John F. Kennedy love this poem?
Kennedy, whose own war service and family losses shaped him, called it his favourite poem and had Jacqueline Kennedy learn it to recite to him. Its blend of fatalism, duty and grace evidently matched his sensibility.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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