Delmore Schwartz - Once and for All - The Best of Delmore Schwartz

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.