Seeger's speaker talks about death the way other people talk about a meeting already in the diary. "Rendezvous" is a word for lovers and secret errands, and in the first line it sits beside a capitalised, personified Death, as if he were someone waiting at a particular spot. That clash between the polite and the terrible drives the whole poem. The speaker is neither terrified nor boastful. He is bound, and the poem asks what it means to keep that bond when everything else tempts him away from it.
The form supports this calm. The lines are mostly iambic tetrameter, a steady, walking pace, and the refrain "I have a rendezvous with Death" returns in every stanza. Its position keeps shifting, though. It opens the poem and recurs in line five, then sits at line five of the second stanza and line six of the third, as though the thought keeps catching up with him however he tries to talk about something else. The stanzas also lengthen, from six lines to eight to ten. The speaker's thoughts widen before the ending pulls them tight again.
The rhyme is worth watching. In the first stanza "Death" has no rhyming partner at all. It stands alone while "barricade" chimes with "shade" and "air" with "fair", so the pleasant sounds of spring surround a word that refuses to blend in. In the second and third stanzas Death finally gets an answer, and the answer is "breath". The first time, Death will "quench my breath". The second time, lovers lie "breath to breath". One word links the two possible endings of a life. The last two lines are the poem's only plain couplet, "true" and "rendezvous", so promise and meeting lock together.
The imagery plays spring against war. The season arrives with "rustling shade", "apple-blossoms" and "blue days and fair", yet the places named are a "disputed barricade", a "scarred slope of battered hill" and a "flaming town". Notice how often the poem says "some": some barricade, some slope, some town. The speaker does not know where this meeting will happen, only that it will. Death himself is oddly gentle in the second stanza, taking his hand, leading him off, closing his eyes, like a guide or a nurse. Even there the poem leaves a thin opening of hope: "It may be I shall pass him still."
The third stanza is where the poem becomes more than a brave gesture. It admits what is being given up. "God knows 'twere better" introduces a soft, sensuous alternative: "silk and scented down", "Love throbs out in blissful sleep", "Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath". The doubled phrases lean together like the lovers they describe, and the trailing ellipsis after "dear" lets the dream hang in the air. Then comes a blunt "But". Midnight and flames replace the pillow, and spring, which "trips north" with an almost playful step, carries on unaware. The speaker does not pretend the sacrifice is small. He chooses it anyway, "to my pledged word… true".
That phrase is the poem's real subject. There is no flag here, no enemy named, no talk of glory. The pull is personal: a promise given, and a self that refuses to break it. Seeger was an American who fought with the French Foreign Legion and was killed in 1916, and knowing that gives the closing vow an unsettling weight. The poem itself, though, does not depend on that fact. Its lines make sense as the voice of anyone who has weighed comfort against duty.
This is why the poem lasts. It does not tell readers that war is simple or that death is easy to face. It gives courage as a decision made with open eyes, beside a full sense of what love and spring could have offered. The poem is quiet and courteous, and the courtesy makes its resolve harder to forget.