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

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…

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)