Delmore Schwartz Poems

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• Best Delmore Schwartz Poems
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by Schwartz, Delmore

 Twenty-eight naked young women bathed by the shore
Or near the bank of a woodland lake
Twenty-eight girls and all of them comely
Worthy of Mack Sennett's camera and Florenz Ziegfield's
Foolish Follies.

They splashed and swam with the wondrous unconsciousness
Of their youth and beauty
In the full spontaneity and summer of the fieshes of
 awareness
Heightened, intensified and softened
By the soft and the silk of...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 "I have been one acquainted with the night" - Robert Frost


Rode in the train all night, in the sick light. A bird
Flew parallel with a singular will. In daydream's moods and
 attitudes
The other passengers slumped, dozed, slept, read,
Waiting, and waiting for place to be displaced
On the exact track of safety or the rack of accident.

Looked out at the night,...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 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...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 Nothing is given which is not taken.

Little or nothing is taken which is not freely desired,
 freely, truly and fully.

"You would not seek me if you had not found me": this is
 true of all that is supremely desired and admired...

"An enigma is an animal," said the hurried, harried 
 schoolboy:

And a horse divided against itself cannot stand;

And a...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 Some who are uncertain compel me. They fear
The Ace of Spades. They fear
Loves offered suddenly, turning from the mantelpiece,
Sweet with decision. And they distrust
The fireworks by the lakeside, first the spuft,
Then the colored lights, rising.
Tentative, hesitant, doubtful, they consume
Greedily Caesar at the prow returning,
Locked in the stone of his act and office.
While the brass band brightly bursts over the...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 Calmly we walk through this April's day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn...)
Besides the photo and the...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 (after Spillane)


Let us be aware of the true dark gods
Acknowledgeing the cache of the crotch
The primitive pure and pwerful pink and grey
 private sensitivites
Wincing, marvelous in their sweetness, whence rises
 the future.

Therefore let us praise Miss Marilyn Monroe.
She has a noble attitude marked by pride and candor
She takes a noble pride in the female nature and torso
She articualtes her...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 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 again! all shall once again!
 All shall be well
By the ringing and the swinging
 of the great beautiful holiday bell
Of Noel! Noel!

II Salute Valentine

I'll drink to thee only with my eyes
When two...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 I

If nature is life, nature is death:
It is winter as it is spring:
Confusion is variety, variety
And confusion in everything
Make experience the true conclusion
Of all desire and opulence,
All satisfaction and poverty.

II

When a hundred years had passed nature seemed to man
 a clock
Another century sank away and nature seemed a jungle
 in a rock
And now that nature has become a ticking...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 In the morning, when it was raining,
Then the birds were hectic and loudy;
Through all the reign is fall's entertaining;
Their singing was erratic and full of disorder:
They did not remember the summer blue
Or the orange of June. They did not think at all
Of the great red and bursting ball
Of the kingly sun's terror and tempest, blazing,
Once the slanting rain threw...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 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 any ballerina,
 just as in the orchard,
Near the apple trees, in the over-grown grasses
Drunken wasps clung to over-ripe pears
Which had fallen: swollen and disfigured.
For now it is...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 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,...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 "little soul, little flirting,
 little perverse one
 where are you off to now?
 little wan one, firm one
 little exposed one...
 and never make fun of me again."


Now I must betray myself.
The feast of bondage and unity is near,
And none engaged in that great piety
When each bows to the other, kneels, and takes
Hand in hand, glance and glance, care...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 Is the spider a monster in miniature?
His web is a cruel stair, to be sure,
Designed artfully, cunningly placed,
A delicate trap, carefully spun
To bind the fly (innocent or unaware)
In a net as strong as a chain or a gun.

There are far more spiders than the man in the street
 supposes
And the philosopher-king imagines, let alone knows!
There are six hundred kinds...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 1

The children of the Czar
Played with a bouncing ball

In the May morning, in the Czar's garden,
Tossing it back and forth.

It fell among the flowerbeds
Or fled to the north gate.

A daylight moon hung up
In the Western sky, bald white.

Like Papa's face, said Sister,
Hurling the white ball forth.

 2

While I ate a baked potato
Six thousand miles apart,

In Brooklyn, in 1916,
Aged two,...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 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 that weakens the nerve
Of will, and closes my eyes, as they should not be
(They should burn like the street-light all night quietly,
So that whatever is present will be...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 The common rain had come again
Slanting and colorless, pale and anonymous,
Fainting falling in the first evening
Of the first perception of the actual fall,
The long and late light had slowly gathered up
A sooty wood of clouded sky, dim and distant more and
 more
Until, at dusk, the very sense of selfhood waned, 
A weakening nothing halted, diminished or denied or set
...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 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 of air,
Changing, second by second, shifting and changing the
 light,
Bring fresh rain to the stone of the library steps.

Under the famous names upon the pediment:
 Thales, Aristotle,
Cicero, Augustine,...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 "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 beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,
Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,
That heavy...Read more of this...

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by Schwartz, Delmore

 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...Read more of this...

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