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

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.

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!