Delmore Schwartz

I Christmas Poem for Nancy Noel, Noel We live and we die Between heaven and hell Between the earth and the sky And all shall be well And all shall be unwell And once

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

(After Rilke) The city floats no longer like a bait To hook the nimble darting summer days. The glazed and brittle palaces pulsate and radiate And glitter. Summer’s garden sways, A heap of marionettes

Let me not, ever, to the marriage in Cana Of Galilee admit the slightest sentiment Of doubt about the astonishing and sustaining manna Of chance and choice to throw a shadow’s element Of disbelief

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

“The trumpet is a brilliant instrument.” – Dietrich Buxtehude Come and come forth and come up from the cup of Your dumbness, stunned and numb, come with The statues and believed in, Thinking this

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

(After Valery) This hushed surface where the doves parade Amid the pines vibrates, amid the graves; Here the noon’s justice unites all fires when The sea aspires forever to begin again and again. O

This is the greatest thing in North America: Europe is the greatest thing in North America! High in the sky, dark in the heart, and always there Among the natural powers of sunlight and

I should have been a plumber fixing drains. And mending pure white bathtubs for the great Diogenes (who scorned all lies, all liars, and all tyrannies), And then, perhaps, he would bestow on me

(With much help from Robert Good, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and little Catherine Schwartz) Shall I compare her to a summer play? She is too clever, too devious, too subtle, too dark: Her lies

Come, let us rejoice in James Joyce, in the greatness of this poet, king, and king of poets For he is our poor dead king, he is the monarch and Caesar of English, he

What is to be given, Is spirit, yet animal, Colored, like heaven, Blue, yellow, beautiful. The blood is checkered by So many stains and wishes, Between it and the sky You could not choose,

(After Valery) O Sea! … ‘Tis I, risen from death once more To hear the waves’ harmonious roar And see the galleys, sharp, in dawn’s great awe Raised from the dark by the rising

A poem moves forward, Like the passages and percussions of trains in progress A pattern of recurrence, a hammer of repetetiveoccurrence A slow less and less heard Low thunder under all passengers Steel sounds

When from the watercolored window idly you look Each is but and clear to see, not steep: So does the neat print in an actual book Marching as if to true conclusion, reap The

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

“the withness of the body” Whitehead 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

(Robert Frost, 1875-1963) Whose wood this is I think I know: He made it sacred long ago: He will expect me, far or near To watch that wood immense with snow. That famous horse

Remember midsummer: the fragrance of box, of white roses And of phlox. And upon a honeysuckle branch Three snails hanging with infinite delicacy Clinging like tendril, flake and thread, as self-tormented And self-delighted as

Poem Faithful to your commands, o consciousness, o Beating wings, I studied The roses and the muses of reality, The deceptions and the deceptive elation of the redness of the growing morning, And all

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

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

(After Rilke) We cannot know the indescribable face Where the eyes like apples ripened. Even so, His torso has a candelabra’s glow, His gaze, contained as in a mirror’s grace, Shines within it. Otherwise

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

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’

In memory of D. W. Prall The ghosts of James and Peirce in Harvard Yard At star-pierced midnight, after the chapel bell (Episcopalian! palian! the ringing soared!) Stare at me now as if they

News of the Gold World of May in Holland Michigan: “Wooden shoes will clatter again on freshly scrubbed streets “ The tulip will arise and reign again from awnings and windows of all colors

I Aria ” Kiss me there where pride is glittering Kiss me where I am ripened and round fruit Kiss me wherever, however, I am supple, bare and flare (Let the bell be rung

“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 self-destroying waves. The rigor of

Yeats died Saturday in France. Freedom from his animal Has come at last in alien Nice, His heart beat separate from his will: He knows at last the old abyss Which always faced his

In the slight ripple, the fishes dart Like fingers, centrifugal, like wishes Wanton. And pleasures rise as the eyes fall Through the lucid water. The small pebble, The clear clay bottom, the white shell