“Rendezvous with Death” and Imitation War Poetry
Haruki Wakamatsu
The best writing often arises from the worst situations. War poetry has been, not so happily, a staple of
poetry, especially during World War I, and even after the war had ended, the messages they deliver burn into our
hearts. But is it possible for me, a teen born postbellum, to replicate the effect that the poets who went through
the war themselves? I have attempted just that, and while I don’t believe I can ever hope to reach the profundity of
the real war poetry, I have succeeding in passing off as one.
The poem I analyzed was I Have a Rendezvous with Death written by Alan Seeger. A copy of this, and my
own poem, are attached at the end of this essay. In Rendezvous, there are three stanzas six, eight, and ten lines
long respectively, and they have the complex rhyme scheme ABBCAC DDAEAEFF GHGAFAHFAA, a rhyme
scheme that I have never heard before, but is oddly orderly. Each line is
an iambic tetrameter, and one line, “I have a rendezvous with Death”, is
repeated throughout the poem. Therefore, in my own creation, I de -
cided to up the orderliness by using Pascal’s Triangle as a motif. If you
are not familiar with Pascal’s Triangle, it is a triangle of numbers where
each number is the sum of the two numbers above it, starting with a
single 1. It is mathematically iconic not only in that it is relevant in
wide areas from polynomial algebra to statistics, nor only that it yields
countless mathematically useful patterns, but also for its beauty when
visualized in certain ways, most notably highlighting multiples of a
certain number. I made each stanza correspond with a row of Pascal’s Triangle, corresponding each number with
a rhyming ending. I also used the sentence “I am the one who healed our men” or some variant of that as a refrain
repeated about every other stanza. And more basically, I used the same meter as Rendezvous.
However, the part where I failed to reproduce as the flowery, vivid imagery observable in Rendezvous exe-
cuted using metaphors, personifications, and repetition. Repetition I mentioned earlier, and it is stated repeatedly
to set the scene and keep the topic in the reader’s mind. Metaphors include “his [Death’s] dark land”, likely refer -
ring to the afterlife or the process of death, “It may be I shall pass him still”, hoping for a peaceful and painless
death, and “Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep”, in reference to life “draining out” from a dead body. Personi-
fications, specifically, are seen more often than the other kinds of metaphors; as in the refrain, death is personi -
fied as someone the narrator has “a rendezvous with”, and someone who “take[s the narrator’s] hand / And lead[s
the narrator] into his dark land”, and so is spring, depicted as something that “comes back with rustling shade”
and “brings back blue days and fair”. It is a given that poetry should contain comparisons and vivid imagery, and
metaphors including personifications are the principal way in which this can be achieved. However, the rigid
form of my poem made me neglect using vivid imagery, instead settling on banalities.
1
1 1
121
1331
14641
1 5 10 10 5 1
1 6 15 20 15 6 1
Pascal’s Triangle, up to Row 6.
