Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz

from IN DREAMS BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES (1938)

The Ballad of the Children of the Czar

1

The children of the Czar

Played with a bouncing ball

In the May morning, in the Czar’s garden,

Tossing it back and forth.

It fell among the flowerbeds

Or fled to the north gate.

A daylight moon hung up

In the Western sky, bald white.

Like Papa’s face, said Sister,

Hurling the white ball forth.

2

While I ate a baked potato

Six thousand miles apart,

In Brooklyn, in 1916,

Aged two, irrational.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt

Was an Arrow Collar ad.

O Nicholas! Alas! Alas!

My grandfather coughed in your army,

Hid in a wine-stinking barrel,

For three days in Bucharest

Then left for America

To become a king himself.

3

I am my father’s father,

You are your children’s guilt.

In history’s pity and terror

The child is Aeneas again;

Troy is in the nursery,

The rocking horse is on fire.

Child labor! The child must carry

His fathers on his back.

But seeing that so much is past

And that history has no ruth

For the individual,

Who drinks tea, who catches cold,

Let anger be general:

I hate an abstract thing.

4

Brother and sister bounced

The bounding, unbroken ball,

The shattering sun fell down

Like swords upon their play,

Moving eastward among the stars

Toward February and October.

But the Maywind brushed their cheeks

Like a mother watching sleep,

And if for a moment they fight

Over the bouncing ball

And sister pinches brother

And brother kicks her shins,

Well! The heart of man is known:

It is a cactus bloom.

5

The ground on which the ball bounces

Is another bouncing ball.

The wheeling, whirling world

Makes no will glad.

Spinning in its spotlight darkness,

It is too big for their hands.

A pitiless, purposeless Thing,

Arbitrary and unspent,

Made for no play, for no children,

But chasing only itself.

The innocent are overtaken,

They are not innocent.

They are their father’s fathers,

The past is inevitable.

6

Now, in another October

Of this tragic star,

I see my second year,

I eat my baked potato.

It is my buttered world,

But, poked by my unlearned hand,

It falls from the highchair down

And I begin to howl.

And I see the ball roll under

The iron gate which is locked.

Sister is screaming, brother is howling,

The ball has evaded their will.

Even a bouncing ball

Is uncontrollable,

And is under the garden wall.

I am overtaken by terror

Thinking of my father’s fathers,

And of my own will.

In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave

In the naked bed, in Plato’s cave,

Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall,

Carpenters hammered under the shaded window,

Wind troubled the window curtains all night long,

A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding,

Their freights covered, as usual.

The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram

Slid slowly forth.

Hearing the milkman’s chop,

His striving up the stair, the bottle’s chink,

I rose from bed, lit a cigarette,

And walked to the window. The stony street

Displayed the stillness in which buildings stand,

The street-lamp’s vigil and the horse’s patience.

The winter sky’s pure capital

Turned me back to bed with exhausted eyes.

Strangeness grew in the motionless air. The loose

Film grayed. Shaking wagons, hooves’ waterfalls,

Sounded far off, increasing, louder and nearer.

A car coughed, starting. Morning, softly

Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair

From underseas, kindled the looking-glass,

Distinguished the dresser and the white wall.

The bird called tentatively, whistled, called,

Bubbled and whistled, so! Perplexed, still wet

With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so,

O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail

Of early morning, the mystery of beginning

Again and again,

while History is unforgiven.

The Beautiful American Word, Sure

The beautiful American word, Sure,

As I have come into a room, and touch

The lamp’s button, and the light blooms with such

Certainty where the darkness loomed before,

As I care for what I do not know, and care

Knowing for little she might not have been,

And for how little she would be unseen,

The intercourse of lives miraculous and dear.

Where the light is, and each thing clear,

Separate from all others, standing in its place,

I drink the time and touch whatever’s near,

And hope for day when the whole world has that face:

For what assures her present every year?

In dark accidents the mind’s sufficient grace.

Far Rockaway

“the cure of souls.” HENRY JAMES

The radiant soda of the seashore fashions

Fun, foam, and freedom. The sea laves

The shaven sand. And the light sways forward

On the self-destroying waves.

The rigor of the weekday is cast aside with shoes,

With business suits and the traffic’s motion;

The lolling man lies with the passionate sun,

Or is drunken in the ocean.

A socialist health takes hold of the adult,

He is stripped of his class in the bathing-suit,

He returns to the children digging at summer,

A melon-like fruit.

O glittering and rocking and bursting and blue

— Eternities of sea and sky shadow no pleasure:

Time unheard moves and the heart of man is eaten

Consummately at leisure.

The novelist tangential on the boardwalk overhead

Seeks his cure of souls in his own anxious gaze.

“Here,” he says, “With whom?” he asks, “This?” he questions,

“What tedium, what blaze?”

“What satisfaction, fruit? What transit, heaven?

Criminal? justified? arrived at what June?”

That nervous conscience amid the concessions

Is a haunting, haunted moon.

Someone Is Harshly Coughing as Before

Someone is harshly coughing on the next floor,

Sudden excitement catching the flesh of his throat:

Who is the sick one?

Who will knock at the door,

Ask what is wrong and sweetly pay attention,

The shy withdrawal of the sensitive face

Embarrassing both, but double shame is tender

— We will mind our ignorant business, keep our place.

But it is God, who has caught cold again,

Wandering helplessly in the world once more,

Now he is phthisic, and he is, poor Keats

(Pardon, O Father, unknowable Dear, this word,

Only the cartoon is lucid, only the curse is heard),

Longing for Eden, afraid of the coming war.

The past, a giant shadow like the twilight,

The moving street on which the autos slide,

The buildings’ heights, like broken teeth,

Repeat necessity on every side,

The age requires death and is not denied,

He has come as a young man to be hanged once more!

Another mystery must be crucified,

Another exile bare his complex care,

Another spent head spill its wine, before

(When smoke in silence curves

from every fallen side)

Pity and Peace return, padding the broken floor

With heavy feet.

Their linen hands will hide

In the stupid opiate the exhausted war.

Tired and Unhappy, You Think of Houses

Tired and unhappy, you think of houses

Soft-carpeted and warm in the December evening,

While snow’s white pieces fall past the window,

And the orange firelight leaps.

A young girl sings

That song of Gluck where Orpheus pleads with Death;

Her elders watch, nodding their happiness

To see time fresh again in her self-conscious eyes:

The servants bring the coffee, the children retire,

Elder and younger yawn and go to bed,

The coals fade and glow, rose and ashen,

It is time to shake yourself! and break this

Banal dream, and turn your head

Where the underground is charged, where the weight

Of the lean buildings is seen,

Where close in the subway rush, anonymous

In the audience, well-dressed or mean,

So many surround you, ringing your fate,

Caught in an anger exact as a machine!

A Young Child and His Pregnant Mother

At four years Nature is mountainous,

Mysterious, and submarine. Even

A city child knows this, hearing the subway’s

Rumor underground. Between the grate,

Dropping his penny, he learned out all loss,

The irretrievable cent of fate,

And now this newest of the mysteries,

Confronts his honest and his studious eyes—

His mother much too fat and absentminded,

Gazing far past his face, careless of him,

His fume, his charm, his bedtime, and warm milk,

As soon the night will be too dark, the spring

Too late, desire strange, and time too fast,

This first estrangement is a gradual thing

(His mother once so svelte, so often sick!

Towering father did this: what a trick!)

Explained too cautiously, containing fear,

Another being’s being, becoming dear:

All men are enemies: thus even brothers

Can separate each other from their mothers!

No better example than this unborn brother

Shall teach him of his exile from his mother,

Measured by his distance from the sky,

Spoken in two vowels,

I am I.

Sonnet: O City, City

To live between terms, to live where death

Has his loud picture in the subway ride,

Being amid six million souls, their breath

An empty song suppressed on every side,

Where the sliding auto’s catastrophe

Is a gust past the curb, where numb and high

The office building rises to its tyranny,

Is our anguished diminution until we die.

Whence, if ever, shall come the actuality

Of a voice speaking the mind’s knowing,

The sunlight bright on the green windowshade,

And the self articulate, affectionate, and flowing,

Ease, warmth, light, the utter showing,

When in the white bed all things are made.

The Ballet of the Fifth Year

Where the sea gulls sleep or indeed where they fly

Is a place of different traffic. Although I

Consider the fishing bay (where I see them dip and curve

And purely glide) a place that weakens the nerve

Of will, and closes my eyes, as they should not be

(They should burn like the street-light all night quietly,

So that whatever is present will be known to me),

Nevertheless the gulls and the imagination

Of where they sleep, which comes to creation

In strict shape and color, from their dallying

Their wings slowly, and suddenly rallying

Over, up, down the arabesque of descent,

Is an old act enacted, my fabulous intent

When I skated, afraid of policemen, five years old,

In the winter sunset, sorrowful and cold,

Hardly attained to thought, but old enough to know

Such grace, so self-contained, was the best escape to know.

Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,

Metropolitan poetry here and there,

In the park sit pauper and rentier,

The screaming children, the motor-car

Fugitive about us, running away,

Between the worker and the millionaire

Number provides all distances,

It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,

Many great dears are taken away,

What will become of you and me

(This is the school in which we learn…)

Besides the photo and the memory?

(… that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn…)

What is the self amid this blaze?

What am I now that I was then

Which I shall suffer and act again,

The theodicy I wrote in my high school days

Restored all life from infancy,

The children shouting are bright as they run

(This is the school in which they learn…)

Ravished entirely in their passing play!

(… that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!

Where is my father and Eleanor?

Not where are they now, dead seven years,

But what they were then?

No more? No more?

From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,

Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume

Not where they are now (where are they now?)

But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,

The great globe reels in the solar fire,

Spinning the trivial and unique away.

(How all things flash! How all things flare!)

What am I now that I was then?

May memory restore again and again

The smallest color of the smallest day:

Time is the school in which we learn,

Time is the fire in which we burn.

Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Strangers

Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers.

Let Freud and Wordsworth discuss the child,

Angels and Platonists shall judge the dog,

The running dog, who paused, distending nostrils,

Then barked and wailed; the boy who pinched his sister,

The little girl who sang the song from Twelfth Night,

As if she understood the wind and rain,

The dog who moaned, hearing the violins in concert.

— O I am sad when I see dogs or children!

For they are strangers, they are Shakespearean.

Tell us, Freud, can it be that lovely children

Have merely ugly dreams of natural functions?

And you, too, Wordsworth, are children truly

Clouded with glory, learned in dark Nature?

The dog in humble inquiry along the ground,

The child who credits dreams and fears the dark,

Know more and less than you: they know full well

Nor dream nor childhood answer questions well:

You too are strangers, children are Shakespearean.

Regard the child, regard the animal,

Welcome strangers, but study daily things,

Knowing that heaven and hell surround us,

But this, this which we say before we’re sorry,

This which we live behind our unseen faces,

Is neither dream, nor childhood, neither

Myth, nor landscape, final, nor finished,

For we are incomplete and know no future,

And we are howling or dancing out our souls

In beating syllables before the curtain:

We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.

I Am to My Own Heart Merely a Serf

I am to my own heart merely a serf

And follow humbly as it glides with autos

And come attentive when it is too sick,

In the bad cold of sorrow much too weak,

To drink some coffee, light a cigarette

And think of summer beaches, blue and gay.

I climb the sides of buildings just to get

Merely a gob of gum, all that is left

Of its infatuation of last year.

Being the servant of incredible assumption,

Being to my own heart merely a serf.

I have been sick of its cruel rule, as sick

As one is sick of chewing gum all day;

Only inside of sleep did all my anger

Spend itself, restore me to my role,

Comfort me, bring me to the morning

Willing and smiling, ready to be of service,

To box its shadows, lead its brutish dogs,

Knowing its vanity the vanity of waves.

But when sleep too is crowded, when sleep too

Is full of chores impossible and heavy,

The looking for white doors whose numbers are

Different and equal, that is, infinite,

The carriage of my father on my back,

Last summer, 1910, and my own people,

The government of love’s great polity,

The choice of taxes, the production

Of clocks, of lights, and horses, the location

Of monuments, of hotels and of rhyme,

Then, then, in final anger, I wake up!

Merely wake up once more,

once more to resume

The unfed hope, the unfed animal,

Being the servant of incredible assumption,

Being to my own heart merely a serf.

The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me

“the withness of the body”

The heavy bear who goes with me,

A manifold honey to smear his face,

Clumsy and lumbering here and there,

The central ton of every place,

The hungry beating brutish one

In love with candy, anger, and sleep,

Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,

Climbs the building, kicks the football,

Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,

That heavy bear who sleeps with me,

Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,

A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,

Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope

Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.

— The strutting show-off is terrified,

Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,

Trembles to think that his quivering meat

Must finally wince to nothing at all.

That inescapable animal walks with me,

Has followed me since the black womb held,

Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,

A caricature, a swollen shadow,

A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,

Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,

The secret life of belly and bone,

Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,

Stretches to embrace the very dear

With whom I would walk without him near,

Touches her grossly, although a word

Would bare my heart and make me clear,

Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed

Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,

Amid the hundred million of his kind,

The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

A Dog Named Ego, the Snowflakes as Kisses

A dog named Ego, the snowflakes as kisses

Fluttered, ran, came with me in December,

Snuffing the chill air, changing, and halting,

There where I walked toward seven o’clock,

Sniffed at some interests hidden and open,

Whirled, descending, and stood still, attentive

Seeking their peace, the stranger, unknown,

With me, near me, kissed me, touched my wound,

My simple face, obsessed and pleasure bound.

“Not free, no liberty, rock that you carry,”

So spoke Ego in his cracked and harsh voice,

While snowflakes kissed me and satisfied minutes,

Falling from some place half believed and unknown,

“You will not be free, nor ever alone,”

So spoke Ego, “Mine is the kingdom,

Dynasty’s bone: you will not be free,

Go, choose, run, you will not be alone.”

“Come, come, come,” sang the whirling snowflakes,

Evading the dog who barked at their smallness,

“Come!” sang the snowflakes, “Come here! and here!”

How soon at the sidewalk, melted, and done,

One kissed me, two kissed me! So many died!

While Ego barked at them, swallowed their touch,

Ran this way! And that way! While they slipped to the ground,

Leading him further and farther away,

While night collapsed amid the falling,

And left me no recourse, far from my home,

And left me no recourse, far from my home.

from GENESIS: BOOK I (1943)

Editor’s note

Genesis was Schwartz’s most ambitious and least successful work. A sprawling book-length poem interspersed with narrative prose, it was intended, through the alter ego of Hershey Green, to tell Schwartz’s life story, and by extension, the story of European Jews in America. The poem begins as Green is interrupted in his sleep, visited by anxious thoughts and memories, as well as by a host of jovial if cynical spirits who egg him on to tell his tale. In the prose sections, he begins with his ancestors’ lives in Europe, and works his way to his own seventh year in America. In verse passages that separate the prose, the ghosts comment in sometimes gorgeously lyrical, sometimes plodding poetry.

The narrative structure alone would make Genesis a hard book to excerpt, but further complicating the matter is its uneven quality. The prose is often flat, slow, and sentimental, and the voices of the ghosts in verse are often unbelievable or downright silly. But there isn’t a page without good, even great lines and passages.

Genesis was deeply important to Schwartz; in phases of manic self-confidence, he thought the poem would make him immortal, and when despairing he thought it a complete failure. I have chosen to include these selections not because they show Schwartz at his best, but because this work was central to his conception of himself as a person and as a writer. Also, almost none of this book has been available since its initial printing in 1943. A full view of what Schwartz worked to accomplish would be incomplete without it.

I have used this symbol [~] to indicate breaks between selections. My selections begin with the poem’s opening passage.

Selections

“…. Me next to sleep, all that is left of Eden,”

— The one who speaks is not remarkable

In the great city, circa 1930,

His state is not uncommon in the world,

O, by no means, sleepless and seeking sleep

As one who wades in water to the thighs,

Dragging it soft and heavy near the shore;

For now his body’s lapse and ignorance

Permits his heavy mind certain loose sleeves,

Loose sleeves of feeling drawing near a drowse:

He knows of dark and sleep the unity,

He knows all being’s consanguinity,

All anguish sinks into the first of seas,

The sea which soothes with softness ultimate

— Thus he descends,

and coughs, coughs!

the old cold comes,

Jack-in-the-box, the conscious mind snaps up!

— He wakes,

his fuzzed gaze strains the dark,

And at the window’s outline looks, in shock,

To see a certain whiteness glitter there,

Snow! dragging him to the window

With hurried heart. The childhood love still lives in him,

Like a sweet tooth in grown-up married girls,

December’s white delight, a fourth year wish,

The classic swan disguised in modern life,

Freedom and silence shining in New York!

But, standing by the window, sees the truth,

Four stories down the blank courtyard on which

The moonlight shines, diagonal and pale

— And high, the moon’s half-cut and glittering shell

Shines like the ice on which electric shines—

Says to himself, “How each view may be false!”

And then the whole thing happens all over again,

Waking, walking to the window, looking out,

Seeking for snow in May, a miracle

Quick in the dozing head’s compelled free mix

— He sees the snow which is not snow, but light,

The moonlight’s lie, error’s fecundity

Fallen from the dead planet near the roof—

Absolute dark and dream space fall on him,

And he through dark and space begins to fall,

At first afraid, then horrified, then calm.

Then the wide stillness in which dream belief

Begins, prepared for all. And he begins

Once more to tell himself all that he knows

Over and over and over and over again,

All of the lives that have come close to his,

All of his life, much mixed in memory

Many a night through which he cannot sleep,

Many a year, over and over again!

But now a voice begins, strange in the dark,

As from a worn victrola record, needle

Which skims and whirrs, a voice intoned

As of a weak old man with foreign accent,

Ironic, comic, flat and matter of fact,

With alternation measured, artificial,

moaned,

And yet with sympathy, simpatico

as if

A guardian angel sang!

Then other voices,

Bodiless in the dark, entered in chorus:

“He must tell all, amazed as the three Magi

When they beheld the puking child! All is

Not natural! That’s Life, the Magi too

Might have remarked to one another, Life

Full of all things but what one would expect—”

And he who listened said then to himself,

“A daemon, a daemon, no doubt: who else?

Such as was heard by Socrates, perhaps,

Or an angel, the angel who struggled with Jacob,

If Jacob lived, if angels also live—”

To which one voice cried back, as if in echo,

“Rome and romance of Death, what Mutt and Jeff,

Quixote, Alcestis, Jacob, Uncle Sam,

Hamlet and Holmes look down on all of you!

What King and Queen of Hearts as playing cards?

What President or Pharaoh on a coin?

— Your mind, kept waiting by a desperate hope

For the epiphany which starlight seems

Here where Long Island like a liner slants

To the great city, Europe’s last capital,

Now must suppose in Being’s surprises nothing less

Than singers who have soared through many keys,

Justice, Forgiveness, and Knowledge in their cries!—”

“A number of the dead have come to you,

O Hershey Green!”

“Have come to me?” he cried,

He shouted out, rapt in the absolute dark,

As one who in an empty valley bound by rocks

Shouts and awaits with some hope something more

Than merely his own voice in echo bruised,

And merely his own heart,

“Have come to you!

Hallucination holds you by the head,

Many a night you told yourself your life,

Tell it to us, we have no more to do,

Tell it to the immortal dead in the stone

And the chill of their — O so this is it! — conclusion…”

“Is this a true thing?” Hershey Green in the dark

And stillness spoke out again, leaning to hear

If once again his speech would bring back speech,

“O it is true enough! Many are dead.

Come, with your endless story,” one voice said,

“Hallucination leads you by the hand,

This is the way to freedom and to power,

This is the way to knowledge and to hope,

This is the way the world begins and ends,

Logos, man’s inner being going out—”

~

The child was born late at night in the middle of winter.

Jack Green was overwhelmed with joy, excited and exalted as never before in his life. An hour after the child was dragged headfirst with the help of instruments

From his mother’s womb, Jack Green called his relatives and his friends to tell them that he had a son. Snow had begun to fall from the low-hanging sky,

Pink-grey with the city lights, when Jack Green woke relatives and friends from the warmth of sleep: his emotion overflowed and demanded expression and required surrounding and answering voices,

He had to tell everyone! His mother-in-law said to him, They are sleeping, they will be angry. But he could not be stopped,

He spoke with warmth to people he had been cool to for years. His joy placed him outside himself,

He called his brother Albert and spoke with eloquence over the instantaneous miles, saying he had been wrong and on such an occasion

All must be forgiven. Everyone is always wrong all the time, answered Albert, wakened from sleep, too little awake in early morning

To know exactly what he was saying—

“The tears are icicles upon his cheeks

As the poor boy arrives at his first breath—”

“O Life is wonderful beyond belief

Here most of all, in parenthood’s great pleasure…”

“What egotism is so sharp and deaf

(Sharp as the knife and deaf as rock), which lives

That it can quite resist the infant’s face,

The fresh identity, the bawling life?”

“Ravished is Everyman by the small sight!

Faced by the double face and breathing twice

— The harder that the ego pained itself (like ice,

Pressed to the skin, a heavy iron-like pain),

The greater joy abounds! joy overflows…”

“This I always find touching, that great joy

Cannot contain itself, but overflows,

The body must run up and down the stairs,

Shout the good news and kiss the passing stranger,

— Joy drives such overwhelming energy—

Any move will express, dance out, and free

The body from the terrifying pleasure—”

“The father’s joy is a new class of joy,

— First Abraham, after his hopeless years—”

“Forgiveness for his brother and his friends!

Success is kind when quite secure and sure,

Success must buy the drinks, hand out cigars

(These actions are the same as sorrow’s tears!),

And is in this emotion just as blind

And self-absorbed as invalids, as cruel

As disappointment!

At two o’clock in the morning,

Jack Green must call his relatives and friends!”

“Thus may new goodness make the evil good

— I am a hopeless optimist, I know!”

The day came when the child was to be given a name, a name announcing the unique inimitable psyche,

And the tiny foreskin was to be cut with the knife which reached across five thousand years from Palestine,

Making him with this last turn of the knife even unto coitus fully a member of the people chosen for wandering and alienation.

Eva wished to name him Noah, after her dead father, who had come to America with his anger, but her mother did not want her to use that name.

Eva turned over a dozen names in her mind, unable to decide which one she liked best until

She thought of the neighbor’s child, four years of age, fat and happy,

Whom Eva had looked at fondly and fondled during her barren unhappy years. His name was Harold, but he called himself Hershey, a German version, because he was obsessed with chocolate, and amused adults had come to call him Hershey, Hershey Bar, struck by the quaintness,

Extending the smile of amusement at the child with this poem. And Eva had vowed in a moment of delight with the child, that if she had a child, she would name him Hershey, for, looking at him, she saw the image of what she wanted her child to be:

She decided in a moment, Baby Green was named Hershey, howling his pain and ignorance when his foreskin was cut,

And all thought twenty years in advance of the next generation—

“Lo, with what tenderness he speaks his name,

As if he spoke a scandal or a fame!”

“Why not? It is a sign of the self’s darkness,

The private darkness of the individual

The anguished darkness of the struggling will,

The sound which means the ego is alone,

The bass of harbor boats, alone, alone!

The pathos of departure’s fogbound moan,

The self’s self-exile from the womb and home—”

“The basis of the art of poetry,

The hard identity felt in the bone—”

“The basis of the art of music, too,

The self-same darkness flows from orchestras,

The brilliant congress of the instruments

Merely goes walking in what wilderness—”

“His name might have been Noah: beautiful!

Suggests so much a boat on desperate seas—”

“Hershey, I think, is best, the Hershey Bar,

A bitter chocolate or a milk sweet chocolate

— Such is the self, knowing and gnawing the body,

When the decayed teeth of the Pleasure-Principle

Bite it, by the sweet senses’ candies pained!”

“There is a joke which grows within my mind:

Here is a stadium and cheering crowd,

Pigeons pass overhead, and one lets go

(Nature’s necessities are all his life),

— The one man wet amid the 70,000

Cries out, Here are 70,000 faces,

Why did that pigeon have to pick on me?

— The joke of individuality!

O what a practical joke on everyone,

Something is always new under the sun!”

“Enough, dear friend in this, the last illness,

Now let us shift the image for the boy—”

“Let us regard the deities once more,

Augment his story with our world-wide views,

He pleads for it, he looks for it himself

— Let us look down from heights, from Everest—”

“Or from a star, or from Eternity,

O from Eternity, that is, from Death:

What huge divinities move near the child,

Small as a pebble by a mountain side!”

“Lo, by a mountain range! which, lumbering,

Booming and thundering, begins to quake

— As if Creation first cracked nothingness!

Concussion’s stroke rides through the city air—

No lesser trope can be as adequate,

The grandson of two Noahs, running away!

— How many other deities are near!—”

“Europe, America, and Israel,

— Israel bearing, as the boy just said,

The knife which cut the foreskin Moses knew,

Comes for five thousand years from Palestine!”

“How many other deities are near,

And soon, the Great War’s shocking scrimmages!”

“—How wise in intuition of his life

The bawling baby screaming at the knife!”

“But let the obsessed boy renew his story,

So interesting, leaning to what comes next—”

~

“America, America! O Land

Whence come chiefly the poor hurt peoples

Who for a reason good or bad cannot endure

Or be endured by the old Vaterland

— Being a Jew, or being a younger son, being

A Quaker, or among the wise who think

The world may end on any seventh day,

A most dynamic and dramatic view of Life—”

“That Barnum knew America quite well,

He knew the gold rush which the populace

Would run to as to fires. And he knew

The love of freaks, the hatred of the norm,

The passion for monstrosity and shock!”

“Land of the failure! land of the refugee!

Land of the gold like oranges on trees,

Land of the European man who holds

St. Patrick’s Day or Budapest in him

— Moving in such a crowd, Jack Green grew fat

With this world’s goods!”

“Lo, the relation here

Between the immigrant and immigrant

New come: just as the card sharp to the hilt

Uses his victims’ greed, which is in him

Sharper perhaps, but under strict control

(Knowledge of weakness is a mighty strength!)

— Self-knowledge marks the cards and takes the pot

And gives moral dominion to the soul!”

“Thus it is, thus it has always been!

The criminal like the saint needs discipline!”

“What an America! Adams and James

Return how many times to Europe’s shore

As the new troops pass them, in reverse,

(O heavy irony of all such passages!)

And heartsick go to the grave, crying aloud

— We did not know the causes of our lives,

We know at last we did not know our lives!”

“‘Who is Vermeer?’ asked Pierpont Morgan then,

And paid one hundred thousand dollars when

It was explained to him. He was a king!

A financier! master of many hearts!

— Mark Twain preferred cigar store Indians

To all the noble statues which he toured

In Florence and in Rome. He sneered for fun!

—‘I never in my life had any fun,

I never did the things I wished to do!’

Mourned a tycoon, who owned America!

— Red caps, glass beads, and many other things

Little in value first he gave to them,

And stared for gold among most beautiful trees:

O clemens, o pia, o dulces Maria!

This was the first day of America!

All of these immigrants ruined by the ride!”

~

Hershey’s ego defined itself further by means of father, mother and brother.

During these years, when the fog of infancy, blooming and booming, slowly lifted,

Hershey often sat in the window-seat which looked out on a street in the middle of which

A trolley passed, yellow and red in broad stripes, sparking the wire,

Delighting him more than any other object! It was to him a thing of inexhaustible interest, ever-renewed,

A kind of boat, sliding, skating, singing, stopping, and beginning again,

Presenting him with movement which is the beginning of drama, an obvious miracle passing at regular intervals:

And thus it was that when, one day, a middle-aged friend of Eva Green brought her son’s fiancée to the apartment, and when the engaged girl, who was very pretty, drew the child to her

And kissed him! as if he were her future, his plump childness pleasing her, then did he cry out joyously,

‘Trolley, trolley!” his first metaphor, the swift perception of a resemblance between different things. For he meant to say

The pretty lady who kisses me delights me like the trolley.

All the adults were delighted and applauded him and petted him,

Until his success grew warm in him, although he hardly knew why—

“Come now, this is too good, too pure a sign!

Kissed by the fiancée, the girl engaged

In going to the fête where privacies

Mix in the act which makes societies

— Too pat, too easy, and too pure a sign!”

“A fiancée; the quintessential flower:

Who better shall draw from the little boy

The first of all the many metaphors

With which he will enact his hope and fear?”

“How in this death we need the metaphor:

We go from trope to trope like acrobats!”

“Surprises, Being’s surprises everywhere,

— Cumuli clouds full of ontologies!”

“We in our death enjoy this very much,

Seeing how one thing is another thing

In certain ways, a girl being a rose

In certain ways, a poet being a train

(Because he takes you where you have not been),

Painting as light, sleep as essential sin

(Being a desperate abandonment)….”

“Light is the heroine of all the paintings,

The camera is the hero of the screen!”

“Such metaphors are pleasant. But some come

Which show us with their light how much we missed

(Who were not those on whom nothing is lost)

When we were there and could; and might have loved…”

“How much we did not see when we were there,

Walking through Life self-blinded by desire

— Such metaphors like the rack torture us

With utter memory and that remorse

Forever late, which is the greatest pain!”

~

“Now I will really know how good it is

To have the sleep of Eden, like a tree,

I will bear this in mind like a man reprieved

(O how their voices influence my voice!)

And make myself think of the horror which

I have escaped! enjoying everything,

Taking keen pleasure in the smallest things,

Tying my laces, or sharpening a pencil—”

Yet as he spoke, he feared it was not true,

And yet enjoyed it all as he enjoyed

Soft drinks on summer days after a game,

Gulped down to drown the throat’s pulsating need—

His pride rose with these thoughts, vainglorious,

— O like a raving fire leaping up!

He told himself all that his mind might do,

Half-doubting and half hoping it was true:

“As Adam named the beasts, with careful love,

I name the animals and the divinities

Who walk about this newfoundland, America,

(Europe the greatest thing in North America!

For instance, as one voice just said to me)

— As Socrates, who questioned everything

Because his love was great, because he loved

Life very much, but not too much, and not

Enough to accept a life without the stars,

Thus now I’ll flick the salt of intellect

Upon all things, the critical salt which makes

All qualities most vivid and acute—

As Joseph, I’ll enact my sweet revenge

In basic psychological reviews,

Accuse the innocents who perjured me,

Me innocent: showing sublimely then,

The Justice who uncovers innocence,

Omniscient, generous, O all forgiving

And most successful brother who displays

How he was right throughout, in his conceit,

All dreams come true, and every feat performed—”

Then said a far-off singer in his style

Breaking in suddenly on Hershey’s peace,

“Let go this braggadocio, young man!

… Dunamos, dynamite, puissance, Power,

Divinity secretly close to the will

Like May beside the leaf: listen and speak,

The chorus is an ancient well-known goodness,

Like bread and wine, although more difficult. Cause

Is the secrecy and mystery. The Seed

Is marvellous. Let us look down on it. The Star…

Everything is a part and in the pit

Of all the nexi, darkness is cat-black,

In between sleeping and waking, part by part

(And once the sun blared like a lion, and once

The starlight fell like a petal, piercing the eye—)”

And then another ghost assumed the theme,

“Lincoln is on a penny in the mind,

A canton of the spirit! Rises and speaks!

And Jeeves and Cinderella show the boat

We all are in, the rotten ship of state!

Chaplin shuffles and tips his hat! Then runs!

John Bull and Uncle Sam are not cartoons

But heavy actual bullies boxing through us!

They move through all of us, like summer fine:

Keep thinking all the time, O New York boy!

Go back,

In each, all natural being once more lives!

The subtile serpent which the apple brought

To Mamma and to Papa, starting all!

Caesar and Caesar’s pal also in you,

Also the servant and the comedian,

— Lo, he has set the world in each man’s heart!

And both the lamb and lion are quick in you,

The mountain and the lake, the tree and stone

All of these kinds their being must renew

— When you lie down to sleep, they rise in you!”

“Let us fly off and tour the world awhile,

Freely and frankly, going from branch to branch,

To show the boy trouvailles within the mind,

Many Americas found suddenly,

Surprise upon surprise upon surprise!”

“As, once I saw two nuns, like cameras;

There they were, taking pictures of modern life!”

“Remember this, young man, as we fly on,

Verdi at eighty-seven kneeled beneath

The bed to find a fallen collar-stud,

And apoplexy struck him down. Alas!

“Twas this he left out of his operas,

— Of actuality, the ragged richness!

Bend down under the bed and look for this!

O hear the children coming home from school,

And hear the gunshots of the starting car,

And hear the thin strings of the telephone,

And Sister’s ennui, practising her scales,

And see the cinders and the broken glass—”

“And yet, behold the heart within these things:

Change jingled in his pocket like gay pleasure,

And his checked tie was what an attitude.

In his lapel a flower quoted Nature—”

“And more and more, behold the dialectic,

How light brings shadow, how the evil, good,

And how each eminence needs lowness near,

And how each eminence brings straining Iago,

And too much good makes too much sorrow soon—”

“The mind skates like a falling star! the mind

Speeds between heaven and earth like Light itself!”

“The gold, the vivid, and the actual

Will melt like flakes upon the open hand,

The mind in memory alone can live

(How many times I climbed on hands and knees

This Himalaya, depth on every side),

The memory alone can hold the self!

Logos alone can understand the blue—”

“If one but knew, if one knew Being-hood,

— This is as if we sat after a dinner,

And heard of many years in unity,

Or noble lords and ladies who have left

The city struck by plague, passing the time—”

“In us, all natural being once more lives,

— A skein of geese, a walk of snipe,

A murmuration of starlings, an exultation

Of larks, a watch of nightingales, a host

Of sparrows, a cast of hawks, a pride of lions,

a sloth of bears,

A route of wolves, a rag of colts,

a mute of hounds,

A cowardice of curs, a shrewdness of apes,

A luxury of nymphs, a lilt of mares,

A round of girls, a dark of plays, a jig

Of vaudeville, a crowd of joys

— Blue grapes and yellow pears beside a jar!

— All of this life and more, much more in us!

Later we will unmask, singing our names!”

“—Her privates we, yet ignorant in death,

We wait to see Eternity’s worst views—”

Then said another singer in his style,

“In medias res, in the middle of Life,

In the middle of everything, sick boy,

— Where is the first of consciousness, where is

Where first-hand memory begins for you—”

“Eden, image of many complex thoughts

About beginning, hangs just like a picture

In many living rooms in the Western World;

Later, we might consider it; not now, later—”

“Begin in any place in consciousness,

Life and each part of Life is infinite,

Infinitely divisible, traversable,

And visible! seek out the motives there—”

“O seek, he means the depths of the Past from which

The soul’s moves rise as grasses from the earth—”

~

And then one day Hershey played by the door of the apartment house, when three of the other boys, always friends before now, members of the kindergarten class,

Took up the janitor’s hose, coiled serpentine on the sidewalk, and suddenly turned it on Hershey, crying,

You are a Jew! a Jew! Hershey ran away all wet from the baptismal flood of the communal mind,

He ran away to his mother, asking her what was wrong, what was being a Jew?

But she did not answer, he did not know so well, wetly, and sensuously, until far later years.

She took his hand and rang the doorbell where one of his opponents lived,

And protested to his mother in a loud self-righteous tone, which made Hershey ashamed, although he hardly knew why,

But knew that more than he understood defended and offended him,

And knew with passion that laughter thrown at him by boys pitted against him was one of the worst pains, and that other boys turning on him

Stripped him, even if he ran to his mother, stripped him and left him alone, naked, wet and ashamed.

And then one day when his father gave him a fountain pen, and he lost it the very next day,

Playing in the empty lot behind the apartment house. He went and told his mother and begged her then, securing her promise,

Not to tell his father. But when in the evening his father came to see him go to bed, his father asked him and asking smiled,

Where his fountain pen was? When Hershey began to lie, Jack Green smiled still more broadly, the lying child was a joke, or the lying child was himself,

And said to the poor pajama’d boy that he knew he had lost his fountain pen, and gave him another one, his own, a better one, the best, and for some time admired by him,

And then Hershey knew such joy as Adam might have known, had his father brought him back to a greater Eden,

Making his loss his gain. But in the midst of his joy, Hershey saw that his mother had betrayed him,

He saw there was a communication between his parents which would always betray him.

Because he was a child.

“Poor boy, how education comes to you!

Learning to be a Jew, attacked because

A Jew, born to the long habit of pain

And alienation, of the people chosen for pain….”

“Attacked for the first time because you are

A kind, a class! as you were not yourself,

The pain of the sole psyche insufficient,

The naked surd’s self-torture not enough!”

“Thus to begin, in sudden dripping shock,

Abstractions’ mastery, as if a teacher

Taught species, genus, higher genera,

Slapping his student’s face as if to say

This is what faceness is, learn it through pain:

How better than in shock to learn of terms?”

Hershey felt now as when his hands and arms

Fell asleep, powerless, too weak in strength

To hold a cigarette, or hold a pin….

“Now of betrayal, now these far-off singers

Will speak of parents’ and betrayals’ first—”

Hershey prepared himself, speaking these words,

Once more in mimicry of what he heard—

“The loss of faith’s virginity, the sense

That anyone might lie, as when the earth’s

Flatness turned out to be a curving lie,

Falseness objective in the turning world

— The sense that always underneath the face

Many a motive hid the truth, prepared

Illusions, made the mirage, deceived!”

“Life is a lie! Life is a long long lie,”

Another far voice cried, “Death is a news

Life painted differently! What have we now

But this eternal knowledge and regret,

Not an oblivion… at best, a sweet drugged sleep

When we are lucky! the sleep of hospitals—

True, one gets used to pain as one gets used

To living near a waterfall or trains,

But I cannot believe I will become

Used to regret, return, the infinite

Apocalypse of all that might have been,

Millions of instances shown in these lives,

Every future untrue and every hope,

Even in satisfaction, vain and false,

Since no success is terminus, serene….”

“The hanged man like a sack upon a tree

Cannot believe the freedom of the will—”

~

“Happy as some in May, in the May morning,

When sunlight stamps gold coins on the blazed gaze,

And on the river does the diamond-dance,

— These sensuous skins, alas, obsess the life—”

“O Sun of Nature! source of all the forces,

All blooms, all snakes, and Botticelli’s views

Of both of these, and Nature as a dance:

(Light is the heroine of every picture—)”

“O what a glory has the turning world!

And that is why some say that God himself

Took on this flesh:

to be God was not enough

To feel in blues and greens of natural life

Immediacies they have, like any kiss—”

“I hardly know just what it means to me,

But when I hear the word, my soul soars,

Strong as a gull over the evil shores

Of this unending terrifying night—”

“Hear how he speaks like us, now more and more—”

“Again, go back, see how Christ’s story lives,

Born in the winter, risen from the year

As once in Palestine—

“If you were wise!

Like the three Magi all your attitudes,

Expecting any kind of Paradise,

In any poverty or paradox!”

“See how the Bible rules the consciousness

Of the West for two thousand years:

O, what a book!”

“Bible and Ovid too! who brings to us

Leda, Medea, Psyche, she who wished

To look at Love’s forbidden hidden face,

Long before Sigmund Freud looked down on it,

And saw the serpent climbing up the stairs—”

“Psyche arrived after the birth of Christ!”

“The Sistine Chapel is the Western mind!”

“The snow: obsessed with it! This we must know

And understand; his love of it unceasing

In the deep mind beneath the conscious mind

Whence many motives rise up to command!”

“The gift! the bicycle! the gift of motion,

As he had loved the street-car years ago,

Since motion, as the Stagirite once said,

Is being’s deepest wish, most general form….”

“Gift from the doubted wished-for nameless Ahhhhhhhh

— Amid snatches of sleep, dreaming of snow!”

~

“Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!

How just that this great nation, being conceived

In liberty by fugitives should find

— Strange ways and plays of monstrous History—

This Hamlet-type to be the President—”

“This failure, this unwilling bridegroom,

This tricky lawyer full of black despair—”

“He grew a beard, becoming President,

And took a shawl as if he guessed his rôle,

Though with the beard he fled cartoonists’ blacks,

And many laughed and were contemptuous,

And some for four years spoke of killing him—”

“He was a politician — of the heart!—

He lived from hand to mouth in moral things!

He understood quite well Grant’s drunken-ness!

It was for him, before Election Day,

That at Cold Harbor Grant threw lives away

In hopeless frontal attack against Lee’s breastworks!”

“O how he was the Hamlet-man, and this,

After a life of failure made him right,

After he ran away on his wedding day,

Writing a coward’s letter to his bride—”

“How with his very failure, he out-tricked

The florid Douglas and the abstract Davis,

And all the vain men who, surrounding him,

Smiled in their vanity and sought his place—”

“Later, they made him out a prairie Christ

To sate the need coarse in the national heart—”

“His wife went insane, Mary Todd too often

Bought herself dresses. And his child died.

And he would not condemn young men to death

For having slept, in weakness. And he spoke

More than he knew and all that he had felt

Between outrageous joy and black despair

Before and after Gettysburg’s pure peak—”

“He studied law, but knew in his own soul

Despair’s anarchy, terror and error,

— Instruments had to be taken from his office

And from his bedroom in such days of horror,

Because some saw that he might kill himself:

When he was young, when he was middle-aged,

How just and true was he, our national hero!”

“Sometimes he could not go home to face his wife,

Sometimes he wished to hurry or end his life!”

“But do not be deceived. He did not win,

And, it is plain, the South could never win

(Despite the gifted Northern generals!)

— Capitalismus is not mocked, O no!

This stupid deity decided the War—”

“In fact, the North and South were losers both:

— Capitalismus won the Civil War—”

“—Capitalismus won the Civil War,

Yet, in the War’s cruel Colosseum,

Some characters fulfilled their natures’ surds,

Grant the drunkard, Lee the noble soldier,

John Brown in whom the Bible soared and cried,

Booth the unsuccessful Shakespearean,

— Each in some freedom walked and knew himself,

Then most of all when all the deities

Mixed with their barbarous stupidity

To make the rock, root, and rot of the war—”

“This is the way each only life becomes,

Tossed on History’s ceaseless insane sums!”

~

“A wise man says, Religion is what man

Does with his solitude: what a remark!

— We know, do we not know? what some men do

When left alone: Arnauld declared that Man

Was capable of any monstrous act

When left in solitude in his own room

— Pascal, his pupil, on the other hand,

Observed that all our trouble and our pain

Sprang from the failure to stay in one’s room?

— Les extrêmes se touchent: these poles which meet

Define a circle of uneasiness,

Somewhat a swaying sea. We are but sailors—”

“The early morning light becomes a sign:

It is the snow! Even as sometimes snow

Stands for the early morning light. These shifts

Show Baudelaire and Freud were well-advised,

Saying, Man walks through a dark wood of symbols,

All his life long, no matter what he does—”

“I when I heard of God from black despair

Rose always like a bird; quickly, lightly,

Prone in the former life to utter sadness

Because my efforts fell short many times:

I said to myself, ‘An infinite God!

If such a being really exists, he hears

What I am saying now. Does He not know

All, look at all, see all with perfect views?

And if He hears me, is it not possible

— Although I am not sure — that He will help me?

Is it a profanation of the pure Idea

Which makes me think that He really exists

To think that He will aid me in my pain?

Can I be sure?’”

“I too would think these thoughts, also unsure,

— And yet, thinking these thoughts I always rose,

I was less desperate, I could endure

My dark body’s awkward brutality,

I could endure my soul’s black guilt which hoped

The world would end, and all things, screaming, die,

Because I was in my ambition stopped

The while my brother, friend, and enemy

Succeeds with seeming spontaneity,

And wins the girl, acclaim, the world’s applause!

Yes! when I thought of God Himself an sich,

It was enough, although I knew He judged,

Judging the world in me!… Infinite joy

Flooded me then, as if I came to the shore

Of the cold sea upon a summer’s day,

And let my dear dark body be by water’s silk

All over touched and known! This was my stay,

My hope, my wish, my ground, my good, my God!”

“Will Hershey Green go down this old abyss

Of thought in days to come, since now he asks

Questions and answers of the Catholic boy?

— How can he help but go, being what he is?”

“The Sunday-looking people, like big flowers,

Know many shades, however secular:

They know the heart hangs down, a Christmas stocking,

They feel strange drafts, however warm the May,

They know that Nature sails like a Zeppelin

Precarious aloft in a dark void:

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God!

— He marks the fall of sparrows, verily!”

“Everything happens in the mind of God,

This is the play it is, ever since Eden!”

“Let me revive my passions, far from this,

Although as relevant to the agonist,

Let me go off upon a candid cadenza,

Running through memories as shuffling cards:

— Branded by parents with identity,

(Mama and Papa who with private parts

Most irresponsibly began this crise,)

I sailed the seven seas, I saw the Czar,

Millions of mighty men sang through my soul,

The stars stretched out senseless as alphabets,

I thought the world was anybody’s fun!

Gemütlichkeit was like the sunlight then!

The golded charging and electric earth

Appealed to me, full of such plants and sweets!

I saw the infamy which made me rich,

Capitalismus native to the heart,

Nothing like that before for egotism,

Never such forms and such fine playing fields!

I saw the evil of the average man

— Clio! between your legs obscenities

Performed and pushed! Jesus and Socrates

Downed by the populace with happiness,

— I saw all modern life in Street & Smith,

Promised virility, and social charm,

Strong muscles and trapped breasts hailed in the ads,

Yet Life was wonderful, beyond belief,

Wine was a light, and all the arts were lights,

The dancers with their discipline destroyed

The chaos and the waste of Broadway crowds,

They with their limbs an inner order knew,

They took it. with an easy willingness,

I took it too, from an orchestra seat

— But when will the houselights of the universe

Go on? You! You! trapped in your childhood!

Let us go back to the past, quickly and smoothly

The dark water closes its lips on today—”

~

“O Father of all hearts, give this poor boy the power

To speak his naked heart without excessive nausea,

O Dream behind the Dream, give him the strength

To see himself with disgust full depth and full length!”

“The history of Life repeats its endless circle,

over and over and over again,

In the new boy, in the new city, in the time forever new,

forever old,

— All of the famous characters are glimpsed again,

All the well-known events; yet something new,

Unique, undying, free, blessèd or damned!”

“Everything happens in the mind of God:

This is all

You need for wondrous hope, and this we give,

Sleepless Atlantic boy!”

“O no!

You do not give that, but give greater darkness,

All this is but a fixed hallucination

Made by the passion of imagination:

This may be false, if I know anything,

I do not know that all is in the mind of God,

I do not have that hope miraculous,

I am more certain of all other things,

The bed, the darkness, and my dear dark body

Are with me, certain,

God is a dream! And this is what

I do not know and have to know. O if

I only knew that! then what other lights on all—”

Thus Hershey Green, drawn in the opera,

Thrilled and enthralled by each new aria!

“Poor New York boy, with what finality

You will in time say, — and triumphantly!—

O what a metaphysical victory

The first morning and night of death must be!”

END OF BOOK ONE

from VAUDEVILLE

FOR A PRINCESS (1950)

True Recognition Often Is Refused

We poets by the past and future used

Stare east and west distractedly at times,

Knowing there are, in fullness and in flower,

Chrysanthemums and Mozart in the room,

A stillness and a motion, both in bloom.

Or know a girl upon the sofa’s ease,

Curved like a stocking, being profoundly round,

As rich and dark as April’s underground.

We see in strict perception probity,

The lasting soil and good of all our art,

Which purifies the nervous turned-in heart.

And when we hear in music’s empty halls

Torn banners blowing in the rain and shame,

We know these passages are surfaces,

Knowing that our vocation cannot be

Merely a Sunday with the beautiful.

There is pace and grace we must fulfill.

For we must earn through dull dim suffering,

Through ignorance and darkened hope, and hope

Risen again, and clouded over again, and dead despair,

And many little deaths, hardly observed,

The early morning light we have deserved.

Starlight like Intuition Pierced the Twelve

The starlight’s intuitions pierced the twelve,

The brittle night sky sparkled like a tune

Tinkled and tapped out in the xylophone.

Empty and vain, a glittering dune, the moon

Arose too big, and, in the mood which ruled,

Seemed like a useless beauty in a pit;

And then one said, after he carefully spat:

“No matter what we do, he looks at it!

“I cannot see a child or find a girl

Beyond his smile which glows like that spring moon.”

“—Nothing no more the same,” the second said,

“Though all may be forgiven, never quite healed

The wound I bear as witness, standing by;

No ceremony surely appropriate,

Nor secret love, escape or sleep because

No matter what I do, he looks at it—”

“Now,” said the third, “no thing will be the same:

I am as one who never shuts his eyes,

The sea and sky no more are marvelous,

And I no longer understand surprise!”

“Now,” said the fourth, “nothing will be enough,

— I heard his voice accomplish all wit:

No word can be unsaid, no deed withdrawn,

— No matter what is said, he measures it!”

“Vision, imagination, hope or dream,

Believed, denied, the scene we wished to see?

It does not matter in the least: for what

Is altered, if it is not true? That we

Saw goodness, as it is—this is the awe

And the abyss which we will not forget,

His story now the sky which holds all thought:

No matter what I think, I think of it!”

“And I will never be what once I was,”

Said one for long as narrow as a knife,

“And we will never be what once we were;

We have died once: this is a second life.”

My mind is spilled in moral chaos,” one

Righteous as Job exclaimed, “now infinite

Suspicion of my heart stems what I will,

— No matter what I choose, he stares at it!”

“I am as one native in summer places

— Ten weeks’ excitement paid for by the rich;

Debauched by that and then all winter bored,”

The sixth declared. “It is peak left us a ditch!”

“He came to make this life more difficult,”

The seventh said, “No one will ever fit

His measure’s heights, all is inadequate;

No matter what I do, what good is it?”

“He gave forgiveness to us: what a gift?”

The eighth chimed in. “But now we know how much

Must be forgiven. But if forgiven, what?

The crime which was will be; and the least touch

Revives the memory: what is forgiveness worth?”

The ninth spoke thus: “Who now will ever sit

At ease in Zion at the easter feast?

No matter what the place, he touches it!”

“And I will always stammer, since he spoke,”

One, who had been most eloquent, said, stammering,

“I looked too long at the sun; like too much light,

So too much goodness is a boomerang,”

Laughed the eleventh of the troop. “I must

Try what he tried: I saw the infinite

Who walked the lake and raised the hopeless dead:

No matter what the feat, he first accomplished it!”

So spoke the twelfth; and then the twelve in chorus:

“Unspeakable unnatural goodness is

Risen and shines, and never will ignore us;

He glows forever in all consciousness;

Forgiveness, love, and hope possess the pit,

And bring our endless guilt, like shadow’s bars:

No matter what we do, he stares at it!

What pity then deny? what debt defer?

We know he looks at us like all the stars,

And we shall never be as once we were,

This life will never be what once it was!”

He Heard the Newsboys Shouting “Europe! Europe!”

Dear Citizens,

I heard the newsboys shouting “Europe! Europe!”

It was late afternoon, a winter’s day

Long as a prairie, wool and ashen gray,

And then I heard the silence, drop by drop,

And knew I must again confront myself:

“What shall I cry from my window?” I asked myself,

“What shall I say to the citizens below?

Since I have been a privileged character

These four years past. Since I have been excused

From the war for the lesser evil, merciless

As the years to girls who once were beautiful.

What have I done which is a little good?

What apples have I grasped, for all my years?

What starlight have I glimpsed for all my guilt?”

Then to the dead silence I said, in hope:

“I am a student of the morning light,

And of the evil native to the heart.

I am a pupil of emotion’s wrongs

Performed upon the glory of this world.

Myself I dedicated long ago

— Or prostituted, shall I say? — to poetry,

The true, the good, and the beautiful,

Infinite fountains inexhaustible,

Full as the sea, old as the rocks,

new as the breaking surf—”

Such Answers Are Cold Comfort to The Dead

“What empty rhetoric,” the silence said,

“You teach the boys and girls that you may gain

The bread and wine which sensuality

Sues like a premier or a president.

These are illusions of your sense of guilt

Which shames you like a vain lie when revealed.

The other boys slumped like sacks on desperate shores.”

But well you know the life which I have lived,

Cut off in truth by all that I have been

From the normal pleasures of the citizen.

How often in the midnight street I passed

The party where the tin horns blew contempt

And the rich laughter rose as midnight struck,

The party where the New Year popped and foamed,

Opening like champagne or love’s wet crush,

The while I studied long the art which in

America wins silence like a wall.

— I am a student of the kinds of light,

I am a poet of the wakeful night,

In new and yet unknown America.

I am a student of love’s long defeat.

I gave the boys and girls my mind and art,

I taught them of early morning light:

May I not cite this as a little good?”

from SUMMER KNOWLEDGE (1959)

Summer Knowledge

Summer knowledge is not the winter’s truth, the truth of fall, the autumn’s fruition, vision, and recognition:

It is not May knowledge, little and leafing and growing green, blooming out and blossoming white,

It is not the knowing and the knowledge of the gold fall and the ripened darkening vineyard,

Nor the black tormented, drenched and rainy knowledge of birth, April, and travail,

The knowledge of the womb’s convulsions, and the coiled cord’s ravelled artery, severed and cut open,

as the root forces its way up from the dark loam:

The agony of the first knowledge of pain is worse than death, or worse than the thought of death:

No poppy, no preparation, no initiation, no illusion, only the beginning, so distant from all knowledge

and all conclusion, all indecision and all illusion.

Summer knowledge is green knowledge, country knowledge, the knowledge of growing and the supple recognition of the fullness and the fatness and the roundness of ripeness.

It is bird knowledge and the knowing that trees possess when

The sap ascends to the leaf and the flower and the fruit,

Which the root never sees and the root believes in the darkness and the ignorance of winter knowledge

— The knowledge of the fruit is not the knowledge possessed by the root in its indomitable darkness of ambition

Which is the condition of belief beyond conception of experience or the gratification of fruition.

Summer knowledge is not picture knowledge, nor is it the knowledge of lore and learning.

It is not the knowledge known from the mountain’s height, it is

not the garden’s view of the distant mountains of hidden fountains;

It is not the still vision in a gold frame, it is not the measured and treasured sentences of sentiments;

It is cat knowledge, deer knowledge, the knowledge of the full-grown foliage, of the snowy blossom and the rounding fruit.

It is the phoenix knowledge of the vine and the grape near summer’s end, when the grape swells and the apple reddens:

It is the knowledge of the ripening apple when it moves to the fullness of the time of falling to rottenness and death.

For summer knowledge is the knowledge of death as birth,

Of death as the soil of all abounding flowering flaring rebirth.

It is the knowledge of the truth of love and the truth of growing: it is the knowledge before and after knowledge:

For, in a way, summer knowledge is not knowledge at all: it is

second nature, first nature fulfilled, a new birth

and a new death for rebirth, soaring and rising out

of the flames of turning October, burning November,

the towering and falling fires, growing more and

more vivid and tall

In the consummation and the annihilation of the blaze of fall.

“I Am Cherry Alive,” the Little Girl Sang

For Miss Kathleen Hanlon

“I am cherry alive,” the little girl sang,

“Each morning I am something new:

I am apple, I am plum, I am just as excited

As the boys who made the Hallowe’en bang:

I am tree, I am cat, I am blossom too:

When I like, if I like, I can be someone new,

Someone very old, a witch in a zoo:

I can be someone else whenever I think who,

And I want to be everything sometimes too:

And the peach has a pit and I know that too,

And I put it in along with everything

To make the grown-ups laugh whenever I sing:

And I sing: It is true; It is untrue;

I know, I know, the true is untrue,

The peach has a pit, the pit has a peach:

And both may be wrong when I sing my song,

But I don’t tell the grown-ups: because it is sad,

And I want them to laugh just like I do

Because they grew up and forgot what they knew

And they are sure I will forget it some day too.

They are wrong. They are wrong. When I sang my song, I knew, I knew!

I am red, I am gold, I am green, I am blue,

I will always be me, I will always be new!”

Baudelaire

When I fall asleep, and even during sleep,

I hear, quite distinctly, voices speaking

Whole phrases, commonplace and trivial,

Having no relation to my affairs.

Dear Mother, is any time left to us

In which to be happy? My debts are immense.

My bank account is subject to the court’s judgment.

I know nothing. I cannot know anything.

I have lost the ability to make an effort.

But now as before my love for you increases.

You are always armed to stone me, always:

It is true. It dates from childhood.

For the first time in my long life

I am almost happy. The book, almost finished,

Almost seems good. It will endure, a monument

To my obsessions, my hatred, my disgust.

Debts and inquietude persist and weaken me.

Satan glides before me, saying sweetly:

“Rest for a day! You can rest and play today.

Tonight you will work.” When night comes,

My mind, terrified by the arrears,

Bored by sadness, paralyzed by impotence,

Promises: “Tomorrow: I will tomorrow.”

Tomorrow the same comedy enacts itself

With the same resolution, the same weakness.

I am sick of this life of furnished rooms.

I am sick of having colds and headaches:

You know my strange life. Every day brings

Its quota of wrath. You little know

A poet’s life, dear Mother: I must write poems,

The most fatiguing of occupations.

I am sad this morning. Do not reproach me.

I write from a café near the post office,

Amid the click of billiard balls, the clatter of dishes,

The pounding of my heart. I have been asked to write

“A History of Caricature.” I have been asked to write

“A History of Sculpture.” Shall I write a history

Of the caricatures of the sculptures of you in my heart?

Although it costs you countless agony,

Although you cannot believe it necessary,

And doubt that the sum is accurate,

Please send me money enough for at least three weeks.

Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon along the Seine

To Meyer and Lillian Schapiro

What are they looking at? Is it the river?

The sunlight on the river, the summer, leisure,

Or the luxury and nothingness of consciousness?

A little girl skips, a ring-tailed monkey hops

Like a kangaroo, held by a lady’s lead

(Does the husband tax the Congo for the monkey’s keep?)

The hopping monkey cannot follow the poodle dashing ahead.

Everyone holds his heart within his hands:

A prayer, a pledge of grace or gratitude

A devout offering to the god of summer, Sunday and plenitude.

The Sunday people are looking at hope itself.

They are looking at hope itself, under the sun, free from the teething anxiety, the gnawing nervousness

Which wastes so many days and years of consciousness.

The one who beholds them, beholding the gold and green

Of summer’s Sunday is himself unseen. This is because he is

Dedicated radiance, supreme concentration, fanatically threading

The beads, needles and eyes — at once! — of vividness and permanence.

He is a saint of Sunday in the open air, a fanatic disciplined

By passion, courage, passion, skill, compassion, love: the love of life and the love of light as one, under the sun, with the love of life.

Everywhere radiance glows like a garden in stillness blossoming.

Many are looking, many are holding something or someone

Little or big: some hold several kinds of parasols:

Each one who holds an umbrella holds it differently

One hunches under his red umbrella as if he hid

And looked forth at the river secretly, or sought to be

Free of all of the others’ judgement and proximity.

Next to him sits a lady who has turned to stone, or become a boulder,

Although her bell-and-sash hat is red.

A little girl holds to her mother’s arm

As if it were a permanent genuine certainty:

Her broad-brimmed hat is blue and white, blue like the river, like the sailboats white,

And her face and her look have all the bland innocence,

Open and far from fear as cherubims playing harpsichords.

An adolescent girl holds a bouquet of flowers

As if she gazed and sought her unknown, hoped-for, dreaded destiny.

No hold is as strong as the strength with which the trees,

Grip the ground, curve up to the light, abide in the warm kind air:

Rooted and rising with a perfected tenacity

Beyond the distracted erratic case of mankind there.

Every umbrella curves and becomes a tree,

And the trees curving, arise to become and be

Like the umbrella, the bells of Sunday, summer, and Sunday’s luxury.

Assured as the trees is the strolling dignity

Of the bourgeois wife who holds her husband’s arm

With the easy confidence and pride of one who is

— She is sure — a sovereign Victorian empress and queen.

Her husband’s dignity is as solid as his embonpoint:

He holds a good cigar, and a dainty cane, quite carelessly.

He is held by his wife, they are each other’s property,

Dressed quietly and impeccably, they are suave and grave

As if they were unaware or free of time, and the grave,

Master and mistress of Sunday’s promenade — of everything!

— As they are absolute monarchs of the ring-tailed monkey.

If you look long enough at anything

It will become extremely interesting;

If you look very long at anything

It will become rich, manifold, fascinating:

If you can look at any thing for long enough,

You will rejoice in the miracle of love,

You will possess and be blessed by the marvellous blinding radiance of love, you will be radiance.

Selfhood will possess and be possessed, as in the consecration of marriage, the mastery of vocation, the mystery of gift’s mastery, the deathless relation of parenthood and progeny.

All things are fixed in one direction: We move with the Sunday people from right to left.

The sun shines

In soft glory

Mankind finds

The famous story

Of peace and rest, released for a little while from the tides of weekday tiredness, the grinding anxiousness

Of daily weeklong lifelong fear and insecurity,

The profound nervousness which in the depths of consciousness

Gnaws at the roots of the teeth of being so continually, whether in sleep or wakefulness,

We are hardly aware that it is there or that we might ever be free

Of its ache and torment, free and open to all experience.

The Sunday summer sun shines equally and voluptuously

Upon the rich and the free, the comfortable, the rentier, the poor, and those who are paralyzed by poverty.

Seurat is at once painter, poet, architect, and alchemist:

The alchemist points his magical wand to describe and hold the Sunday’s gold,

Mixing his small alloys for long and long

Because he wants to hold the warm leisure and pleasure of the holiday

Within the fiery blaze and passionate patience of his gaze and mind

Now and forever: O happy, happy throng,

It is forever Sunday, summer, free: you are forever warm

Within his little seeds, his small black grains,

He builds and holds the power and the luxury

With which the summer Sunday serenely reigns.

— Is it possible? It is possible!—

Although it requires the labors of Hercules, Sisyphus, Flaubert, Roebling:

The brilliance and spontaneity of Mozart, the patience of a pyramid,

And requires all these of the painter who at twenty-five

Hardly suspects that in six years he will no longer be alive!

— His marvellous little marbles, beads, or molecules

Begin as points which the alchemy’s magic transforms

Into diamonds of blossoming radiance, possessing and blessing the visual:

For look how the sun shines anew and newly, transfixed

By his passionate obsession with serenity

As he transforms the sunlight into the substance of pewter, glittering, poised and grave, vivid as butter,

In glowing solidity, changeless, a gift, lifted to immortality.

The sunlight, the soaring trees and the Seine

Are as a great net in which Seurat seeks to seize and hold

All living being in a parade and promenade of mild, calm happiness:

The river, quivering, silver blue under the light’s variety,

Is almost motionless. Most of the Sunday people

Are like flowers, walking, moving toward the river, the sun, and the river of the sun.

Each one holds some thing or some one, some instrument

Holds, grasps, grips, clutches or somehow touches

Some form of being as if the hand and fist of holding and possessing,

Alone and privately and intimately, were the only genuine lock or bond of blessing.

A young man blows his flute, curved by pleasure’s musical activity,

His back turned upon the Seine, the sunlight, and the sunflower day.

A dapper dandy in a top hat gazes idly at the Seine:

The casual delicacy with which he holds his cane

Resembles his tailored elegance.

He sits with well-bred posture, sleek and pressed,

Fixed in his niche: he is his own mustache.

A working man slouches parallel to him, quite comfortable,

Lounging or lolling, leaning on his elbow, smoking a meerschaum,

Gazing in solitude, at ease and oblivious or contemptuous

Although he is very near the elegant young gentleman.

Behind him a black hound snuffles the green, blue ground.

Between them, a wife looks down upon

The knitting in her lap, as in profound

Scrutiny of a difficult book. For her constricted look

Is not in her almost hidden face, but in her holding hands

Which hold the knitted thing as no one holds

Umbrella, kite, sail, flute or parasol.

This is the nervous reality of time and time’s fire which turns

Whatever is into another thing, continually altering and changing all identity, as time’s great fire burns (aspiring, flying and dying),

So that all things arise and fall, living, leaping and fading, falling, like flames aspiring, flowering, flying and dying—

Within the uncontrollable blaze of time and of history:

Hence Seurat seeks within the cave of his gaze and mind to find

A permanent monument to Sunday’s simple delight; seeks deathless joy through the eye’s immortality:

Strives patiently and passionately to surpass the fickle erratic quality of living reality.

Within the Sunday afternoon upon the Seine

Many pictures exist inside the Sunday scene:

Each of them is a world itself, a world in itself (and as a living child links generations, reconciles the estranged and aged so that a grandchild is a second birth, and the rebirth of the irrational, of those who are forlorn, resigned or implacable),

Each little picture links the large and small, grouping the big

Objects, connecting them with each little dot, seed or black grain

Which are as patterns, a marvellous network and tapestry,

Yet have, as well, the random freshness and radiance

Of the rippling river’s sparkle, the frost’s astonishing systems,

As they appear to morning’s waking, a pure, white delicate stillness and minuet,

In December, in the morning, white pennants streaked upon the windowpane.

He is fanatical: he is at once poet and architect,

Seeking complete evocation in forms as strong as the Eiffel Tower,

Subtle and delicate too as one who played a Mozart sonata, alone, under the spires of Notre-Dame.

Quick and utterly sensitive, purely real and practical,

Making a mosaic of the little dots into a mural of the splendor of order:

Each micro pattern is the dreamed of or imagined macrocosmos

In which all things, big and small, in willingness and love surrender

To the peace and elation of Sunday light and sunlight’s pleasure, to the profound measure and order of proportion and relation.

He reaches beyond the glistening spontaneity

Of the dazzled Impressionists who follow

The changing light as it ranges, changing, moment by moment, arranging and charming and freely bestowing

All freshness and all renewal continually on all that shows and flows.

Although he is very careful, he is entirely candid.

Although he is wholly impersonal, he has youth’s frankness and, such is his candor,

His gaze is unique and thus it is intensely personal:

It is never facile, glib, or mechanical,

His vision is simple: yet it is also ample, complex, vexed, and profound

In emulation of the fullness of Nature maturing and enduring and toiling with the chaos of actuality.

An infinite variety within a simple frame:

Countless variations upon a single theme!

Vibrant with what soft soft luster, what calm joy!

This is the celebration of contemplation,

This is the conversion of experience to pure attention,

Here is the holiness of all the little things

Offered to us, discovered for us, transformed into the vividest consciousness,

After the shallowness or blindness of experience,

After the blurring, dirtying sooted surfaces which, since Eden and since birth,

Make all the little things trivial or unseen,

Or tickets quickly torn and thrown away

En route by rail to an ever-receding holiday:

— Here we have stopped, here we have given our hearts

To the real city, the vivid city, the city in which we dwell

And which we ignore or disregard most of the luminous day!

… Time passes: nothing changes, everything stays the same. Nothing is new

Under the sun. It is also true

That time passes and everything changes, year by year, day by day,

Hour by hour. Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon along the Seine has gone away,

Has gone to Chicago: near Lake Michigan,

All of his flowers shine in monumental stillness fulfilled.

And yet it abides elsewhere and everywhere where images

Delight the eye and heart, and become the desirable, the admirable, the willed

Icons of purified consciousness. Far and near, close and far away

Can we not hear, if we but listen to what Flaubert tried to say,

Beholding a husband, wife and child on just such a day:

Ils sont dans le vrai! They are with the truth, they have found the way

The kingdom of heaven on earth on Sunday summer day.

Is it not clear and clearer? Can we not also hear

The voice of Kafka, forever sad, in despair’s sickness trying to say:

“Flaubert was right: Ils sont dans le vrai!

Without forbears, without marriage, without heirs,

Yet with a wild longing for forbears, marriage, and heirs:

They all stretch out their hands to me: but they are too far away!”

Once and for All

Once, when I was a boy,

Apollo summoned me

To be apprenticed to the endless summer of light and consciousness,

And thus to become and be what poets often have been,

A shepherd of being, a riding master of being, holding the sun-god’s horses, leading his sheep, training his eagles,

Directing the constellations to their stations, and to each grace of place.

But the goat-god, piping and dancing, speaking an unknown tongue or the language of the magician,

Sang from the darkness or rose from the underground, whence arise

Love and love’s drunkenness, love and birth, love and death, death and rebirth

Which are the beginning of the phoenix festivals, the tragic plays in celebration of Dionysus,

And in mourning for his drunken and fallen princes, the singers and sinners, fallen because they are, in the end,

Drunken with pride, blinded by joy.

And I followed Dionysus, forgetting Apollo. I followed him far too long until I was wrong and chanted:

“One cannot serve both gods. One must choose to win and lose.”

But I was wrong and when I knew how I was wrong I knew

What, in a way, I had known all along:

This was the new world, here I belonged, here I was wrong because

Here every tragedy has a happy ending, and any error may be

A fabulous discovery of America, of the opulence hidden in the dark depths and glittering heights of reality.

from Narcissus

THE MIND IS AN ANCIENT AND FAMOUS CAPITAL

The mind is a city like London,

Smoky and populous: it is a capital

Like Rome, ruined and eternal,

Marked by the monuments which no one

Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains

Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces,

Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled.

The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins

Of every haunted, hunted generation’s celebration.

“Call us what you will: we are made such by love.”

We are such studs as dreams are made on, and

Our little lives are ruled by the gods, by Pan,

Piping of all, seeking to grasp or grasping

All of the grapes; and by the bow-and-arrow god,

Cupid, piercing the heart through, suddenly and forever.

Dusk we are, to dusk returning, after the burbing,

After the gold fall, the fallen ash, the bronze,

Scattered and rotten, after the white null statutes which

Are winter, sleep, and nothingness: when

Will the houselights of the universe

Light up and blaze?

For it is not the sea

Which murmurs in a shell,

And it is not only heart, at harp o’clock,

Is is the dread terror of the uncontrollable

Horses of the apocalypse, running in wild dread

Toward Arcturus — and returning as suddenly…

from LAST & LOST POEMS (1989)

This Is a Poem I Wrote at Night, before the Dawn

This is a poem I wrote before I died and was reborn:

— After the years of the apples ripening and the eagles soaring,

After the festival here the small flowers gleamed like the first stars,

And the horses cantered and romped away like the experience of skill; mastered and serene

Power, grasped and governed by reins, lightly held by knowing hands.

The horses had cantered away, far enough away

So that I saw the horses’ heads farther and farther away

And saw that they had reached the black horizon on the dusk of day

And were or seemed black thunderheads, massy and ominous waves in the doomed sky:

And it was then, for the first time, then that I said as I must always say

All through living death of night:

It is always darkness before delight!

The long night is always the beginning of the vivid blossom of day.

America, America!

I am a poet of the Hudson River and the heights above it,

the lights, the stars, and the bridges

I am also by self-appointment the laureate of the Atlantic

— of the peoples’ hearts, crossing it

to new America.

I am burdened with the truck and chimera, hope,

acquired in the sweating sick-excited passage

in steerage, strange and estranged

Hence I must descry and describe the kingdom of emotion.

For I am a poet of the kindergarten (in the city)

and the cemetery (in the city)

And rapture and ragtime and also the secret city in the heart and mind

This is the song of the natural city self in the 20th century.

It is true but only partly true that a city is a “tyranny of numbers”

(This is the chant of the urban metropolitan and metaphysical self

After the first two World Wars of the 20th century)

— This is the city self, looking from window to lighted window

When the squares and checks of faintly yellow light

Shine at night, upon a huge dim board and slab-like tombs,

Hiding many lives. It is the city consciousness

Which sees and says: more: more and more: always more.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

I looked toward the movie, the common dream,

The he and she in close-ups, nearer than life,

And I accepted such things as they seem,

The easy poise, the absence of the knife,

The near summer happily ever after,

The understood question, the immediate strife,

Not dangerous, nor mortal, but the fadeout

Enormously kissing amid warm laughter,

As if such things were not always played out

By an ignorant arm, which crosses the dark

And lights up a thin sheet with a shadow’s mark.

Poem

You, my photographer, you, most aware,

Who climbed to the bridge when the iceberg struck,

Climbed with your camera when the ship’s hull broke,

And lighted your flashes and, standing passionate there,

Wound the camera in the sudden burst’s flare,

Shot the screaming women, and turned and took

Pictures of the iceberg (as the ship’s deck shook)

Dreaming like the moon in the night’s black air!

You, tiptoe on the rail to film a child!

The nude old woman swimming in the sea

Looked up from the dark water to watch you there;

Below, near the ballroom where the band still toiled,

The frightened, in their lifebelts, watched you bitterly—

You hypocrite! My brother! We are a pair!

Philology Recapitulates Ontology, Poetry Is Ontology

Faithful to your commandments, o consciousness, o

Holy bird of words soaring ever whether to nothingness or to inconceivable fulfillment slowly:

And still I follow you, awkward as that dandy of ontology and as awkward as his albatross and as

another dandy of ontology before him, another shepherd and watchdog of being, the one who

Talked forever of forever as if forever of having been and being an ancient mariner,

Hesitant forever as if forever were the albatross

Hung round his neck by the seven seas of the seven muses,

and with as little conclusion, since being never concludes,

Studying the sibilance and the splashing of the seas and of seeing and of being’s infinite seas,

Staring at the ever-blue and the far small stars and the faint white endless curtain of the twinkling play’s endless seasons.

What Curious Dresses All Men Wear

What curious dresses all men wear!

The walker you met in a brown study,

The President smug in rotogravure,

The mannequin, the bathing beauty.

The bubble-dancer, the deep-sea diver,

The bureaucrat, the adulterer,

Hide privates parts which I disclose

To those who know what a poem knows.

The Poet

The riches of the poet are equal to his poetry

His power is his left hand

It is idle weak and precious

His poverty is his wealth, a wealth which may destroy him like Midas

Because it is that laziness which is a form of impatience

And this he may be destroyed by the gold of the light which never was

On land or sea.

He may be drunken to death, draining the casks of excess

That extreme form of success.

He may suffer Narcissus’ destiny

Unable to live except with the image which is infatuation

Love, blind, adoring, overflowing

Unable to respond to anything which does not bring love quickly or immediately.

… The poet must be innocent and ignorant

But he cannot be innocent since stupidity is not his strong point

Therefore Cocteau said, “What would I not give

To have the poems of my youth withdrawn from existence?

I would give to Satan my immortal soul.”

This metaphor is wrong, for it is his immortal soul which he wished to redeem,

Lifting it and sifting it, free and white, from the actuality of youth’s banality, vulgarity,

pomp and affectation of his early

works of poetry.

So too in the same way a Famous American Poet

When fame at last had come to him sought out the fifty copies

of his first book of poems which had been privately printed

by himself at his own expense.

He succeeded in securing 48 of the 50 copies, burned them

And learned then how the last copies were extant,

As the law of the land required, stashed away in the national capital,

at the Library of Congress.

Therefore he went to Washington, therefore he took out the last two copies

Placed them in his pocket, planned to depart

Only to be halted and apprehended. Since he was the author,

Since they were his books and his property he was reproached

But forgiven. But the two copies were taken away from him

Thus setting a national precedent.

For neither amnesty nor forgiveness is bestowed upon poets, poetry and poems,

For William James, the lovable genius of Harvard

spoke the terrifying truth: “Your friends may forget, God may forgive you, But the brain cells record

your acts for the rest of eternity.”

What a terrifying thing to say!

This is the endless doom, without remedy, of poetry.

This is also the joy everlasting of poetry.

Unpublished Poems

Editor’s note

Robert Phillips, in editing Last & Lost Poems, thoroughly combed Schwartz’s papers, which are held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. That volume represents the poems Schwartz brought near to complete or publishable form. I found the two pieces that follow through my own research in the Schwartz archive; the pages I found were typescripts with handwritten changes and subsequent drafts written on the same sheet. These were not poems Schwartz intended to publish, at least not in this form; there may have been subsequent drafts that I did not find or that no longer exist.

Nonetheless, I think they will be of interest to the reader. The first is a birthday poem to Schwartz’s first wife, Gertrude Buckman. The second is a longer draft of a poem written as Schwartz’s marriage to Buckman was ending; a short version appears in James Atlas’s biography, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of An American Poet.

In both cases, I did my best to interpret Schwartz’s handwriting and draft sequences to assemble as finished versions as possible of the poems. To my knowledge, they haven’t been published before in these versions.

A Poem For Gertrude’s Birthday (1937)

Where the will moves, time is

And it’s your will I wish

Which is the truth of every kiss,

Beneath its butter-like touch:

For you are beautiful

For death is in your look,

Yet your joy is every joy

Which is remarkable.

But by no machine is luck

Only by the temporal clock

Can I grasp and wholly take

That new will of twenty-five

(Original, day by day

As every moment has its play

And the kings and ghosts arrive,

Only in time, the orange West,

O sister, doll, and animal,

Can I arrive at your rich breast

And taste the gift of your sweet will

Doggerel Beneath the Skin [fragment]

Poor Schwartz! Poor Schwartz!

Love anyway to all of them!

And may they live to see the peace

When no one has to drink to live

And work without hysteria,

Self-pity and insomnia,

Poor Schwartz! Poor Schwartz!

Self-doubt and sun deliria!

Poor Blackmur and poor Schwartz!

Poor Schwartz, he meant well anyway?

But all for parents loves must pay!

Poor Berryman! Poor Schwartz,

All poet’s wives have rotten lives,

Their husbands look at them like knives,

Exactitude their livelihood

The audience would have them miss

Poor Gertrude, poor Eileen

(No longer seventeen)

But back to children, not yet done,

(The infamy has just begun!)

When Sage bathed in the Swishe’s house,

with joy came in and looked,

— And all looked on

Sage stared right back, cold, bored, polite

(This was an act Keith would have booked!),

While Susie glittered in the light!

And now with sudden happiness,

I think of last year’s New Year’s Eve,

(When Nela falls on Hortin’s stairs,

Strange God is kind or he is luck),

And if God is, or is good luck

Some of us may enjoy a duck!