I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple blossoms fill the air.

These lines open Alan Seeger’s war poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” written while he served as an American volunteer in the French Foreign Legion during World War I. Seeger, an expatriate poet, enlisted in 1914 before the United States entered the war and became known for idealizing sacrifice for France. The poem reflects the trench-war reality of sudden death—imagined here as an appointment at a “disputed barricade”—set against the return of spring. Seeger was killed in action at Belloy-en-Santerre during the Battle of the Somme on July 4, 1916, which later lent the poem a poignant, prophetic reputation.

The speaker treats death not as an accident but as a scheduled meeting—an inescapable obligation accepted with composure. By placing this “rendezvous” in springtime, amid “rustling shade” and “apple blossoms,” Seeger intensifies the contrast between nature’s renewal and the man-made destruction of war. The diction of romance (“rendezvous”) and the calm cadence suggest a stoic, even courtly fatalism: the soldier acknowledges that life’s beauty will continue, yet he must keep faith with duty and comrades at the barricade. The poem’s power lies in this tension between pastoral tenderness and the certainty of violent loss.