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

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,