Calmly we walk: Delmore Schwartz
—John Updike: we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else.
Delmore Schwartz was a mid-20th-century poet with a tragic life but a wonderful gift. In fact, Saul Bellow wrote the novel Humboldt’s Gift based on Schwartz, who was a literary sensation at a young age but who faded with time and alcoholism and mental illness, dying alone in a New York hotel at the age of 52.
Schwartz looked the quintessential poet, too:
And he wrote some beautiful poetry that contains an air of mystery and awe.
One of my favorites is “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day“. I suggest you follow the link now and read the poem in its entirety to get the feel and flow of the whole before I discuss bits and pieces of it.
The poem begins somewhat slowly:
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…
Although it’s poetry, this beginning is rather pedestrian, in both senses of the word. The poet is talking to someone (“we”) as he walks—maybe a girlfriend or wife? Or maybe he’s using the universal “we” as in “this is how we all stroll around in the park on a nice spring day.”
The poem is also very specific. Its specificity is in the designation of a certain time: April, 1937. Poets don’t often pin their creations to such an exactness of date unless they are speaking of some great historic event. But this is not a great historic event. It’s an ordinary spring day in an ordinary New York park. And this “we” is walking very calmly (in fact, that’s the first word of the poem).
So nothing special is happening.
But then there’s a turning that takes the reader by surprise, maybe even by shock. The setup of the ordinary day is peeled back and is revealed as transcendent, as all days are, and the poet speculates on the deepest questions of existence. Here’s the next line, right after “Number provides all distances/It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now”¦”:
Many great dears are taken away,…
Whoa! Yes, they are, for all of us. And then he follows with this:
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn …)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(… that time is the fire in which we burn.)
So within this most ordinary day in the park—a sort of cliche, really—we have the presence of death and its seeming (possible, questionable) obliteration of the self. And the mechanism for that is the passage of time—which is the school in which we learn and the fire in which we burn, because each moment dies as it is born.
I don’t know about you, but that transition passage hits me like a ton of bricks every time I read it. I never quite expect it even though I’ve read the poem many times. And the transition would not be as forceful without the specifics that precede it (those numbers do indeed “provide distances”). Perhaps we, the modern readers, feel it even more strongly, because it’s been over eighty years since that April day to which the poet is referring, and just about everyone who was around him on that day in the park (except some of the babies and children) is dead.
I’m not going to discuss every line of the poem, but here’s another excerpt in which the poet returns to the very specific, naming some of the people who are gone:
Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?…
Five lines and four question marks. Good questions, too.
This is the last stanza, which never fails to give me goosebumps:
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
Schwartz is caught up in a great rush of feeling that I think can rightly be called cosmic—as he calmly walks through that April day in 1937. And now, perhaps, the strangeness of the word “through” in that sentence has more meaning.
The poet was a mere 23 years old when he wrote that poem. I think of him as a human tuning fork, vibrating too sensitively (and almost unbearably) to the harmony of the spheres.
Oh. My. God.
Made that last stanza into my poem of the week in about one nanosecond.
“May memory restore again and again ” indeed.
Oh Neo. Thank you.
He asks important questions but has no answers.
Which reminds me of the film director Frank Capra’s remonstration to his peers at the Academy Awards when receiving a lifetime achievement award; ‘If you’re going to ask people to sit in the dark for two hours and preach to them, you’d better have something to say worth their time’.
Geoffrey Britain:
His answer is in the medium of poetry. It’s a different kind of “answer.”
Mrs Whatsit:
You’re welcome.
I was quite blown away by the poem.
Lou Reed, not exactly a generous person, always acknowledged his debt to Schwartz who was a teacher to Reed and became a friend.
“O Delmore how I miss you”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/69810/o-delmore-how-i-miss-you
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
It’s not bad theology either.
We came and chose to take on mortal form, which subjected us to death and thus linear time. We also chose this to learn and grow. Our memories were wiped, not after we leave the underworld for the Veil, but after we left the Heavens for the underworld (this world).
We all suffer from a kind of amnesia and don’t realize that the world we live in is more similar to the Matrix and VR simulations we play on our PCs. The spirit is the real world, not this matter and flesh.
Perhaps some of you get goosebumps because your heart and soul still remembers what your mind has forgotten…
The reincarnators call it the transmigration cycle. Although there’s often lively debate about exactly the details.
Ymar Sakar:
Wordsworth:
I knew somebody who knew Delmore Schwartz when he (my good friend) was young. So I heard about him sometimes. My friend was George Sarant, the son of Isaac Rosenfeld (the best friend of Saul Bellow for a few years).
George was a doctor at the Emergency Room in Portland Oregon where I worked. He suffered a heart attack when he was the same age as his father had been, 38. George survived, though he had to have bypass surgery. He was there in the ER and hooked himself up to a monitor when he felt the onset. Isaac, his father, died there at home.
Delmore Schwartz was indeed brilliant. Supposedly he was quite bitter about the fact that other writers he knew, several perhaps with less talent, achieved much more worldly success.
Lou Reed dedicated the song “European Son” to Schwartz, the last song on Side One of the Velvet Underground’s first album in 1965.
The last 5 lines of the last stanza that you highlighted are pretty great, probably means more as a person gets older (which, disturbingly, seems to be happening to me). Thanks for posting this.
Here’s my favorite Schwartz poem, a sonnet to be precise, which I first read in the wonderful, cheap Bantam paperback, Hayden Carruth anthology, “The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century”:
———————————————————–
The Beautiful American Word, Sure
The beautiful American word, Sure,
As I have come into a room, and touch
The lamp’s button, and the light blooms with such
Certainty where the darkness loomed before,
As I care for what I do not know, and care
Knowing for little she might not have been,
And for how little she would be unseen,
The intercourse of lives miraculous and dear.
Where the light is, and each thing clear,
separate from all others, standing in its place,
I drink the time and touch whatever’s near,
And hope for day when the whole world has that face:
For what assures her present every year?
In dark accidents the mind’s sufficient grace.
————————————————————–
I confess I’m not sure what’s going on past the first verse — who is she?, what dark accidents? — but that first verse is such a knock-out! And the final lines of the other verses.
A quick scan of the web suggests no one else is sure either.
I am happy I followed the link to this post. Thank you Neo-Neocon.
@huxley:
Thank you for sharing the poem and its source. In this one I seem to see a description of Buddhist Enlightenment. A moment that comes unexpectedly– by accident– and changes a ‘dark’ mind into one that is sure of cosmic truth.
It would be interesting to know if Mr. Schwartz had such an epiphany, or one of a different sort. He could be describing only his own creative moment that leads to a poem where none had been before. One inspired by the simple act of turning on a lamp, being Americanly certain it would light the room.
I like it that he thinks of his insight in female terms. After all, it still usually takes a male and a female to bring something new into the world.
Human Pitchfork to Human Tuning Fork: Not bad, not bad at all!
cf. Margaret are You Grieving… by the time Schwartz has schlepped briefly into the scene ~50/60 years later, we’ve moved on (down, alas) from generations of variations upon Bare Ruined Choirs to embers being batted about and extinguished by an impersonal cosmos — no matter how transcendent the imagery.
It’s still a wonderful poem. We people of today run a country mile to avoid facing our impermanence and death, let alone that of others.
Gerard V: This one pairs nicely with your Coney Island beach photograph post!
Neo:
I had some reports and data that children before they are 4, have been interviewed with previous life memories (that weren’t regressive hypnotically implanted).
“Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
Looks like Word over there, may have been one of the same class of individuals.
After 4 years of age, they integrate completely with this body and forget that they ever recalled what they recalled.
There are child prodigies that very smart for their age, but as time goes on their IQ and advancements averages out to being merely above average. I wonder if that is because they are accessing the bio network of their previous memories. Over time, these bio neural networks will fade away without reinforcement, leaving a normal IQ progression instead of the super advance.
Some of us, however, have a trick called a backup memory. We remember that we once had forgotten what we remembered.
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
In Ancient Hebrew and Bibilical studies, the stars were entities, living souls, to people’s interpretation. Thus when YHVH said to Abraham that his descendants would become the stars, this was a literal promise. There was not the English interpolation, “become as many as the stars”.
Our Life’s star is the physical interpolation of the spiritual realm unto the physical realm, the same way hypervolumes and a sphere looks to a 2 dimensional plane/paper.
But aren’t stars just these big fusion balls of gas in space, don’t we all know that by now… heh, more on that later.
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a mother’s mind, 80
And no unworthy aim,
The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.
Based on Rabbinical teachings, the food and desires of the physical realm is different from and opposite to the spiritual realm. What is valuable in the heaven is worthless on earth. What is valuable on earth, is worthless in the heavens.
Thus those born on and that live on the earth, get used to earthly food and pleasures, which makes it easier to forget the spiritual pleasures and food.
However, some of the enlightened masters could overcome this little issue temporarily with fasting, prayer, or various other things.
There’s even some rare data that an Indian guru fasted for years without eating or drinking, and was still perfectly healthy. He and others of his kind, said that they gained energy from the light.
That would have been hard for me to believe, if I hadn’t had a similar experience before hearing that…
Normally when people fast, they want to go back to earthly food. For me, the longer I fast, the more I dislike earthly food. That is a sign that my perceptions are harmonizing more with my spirit than my physical avatar. After about 2.5 days of fasting on nothing but water and a cherry or 2 a day, I walked about .5-1.2 miles to an all you can eat restaurant, ate something for awhile, then walked back. I noticed something interesting. I felt energy coming in from the sunlight, and wasn’t particularly tired, just really hot. Then a rain cloud came over, which didn’t block the sun at me, and rained. On my side of the street only for awhile. That was nice.
This is self mortification under the various Oriental monk schools. Increase one’s Willpower by subjecting the body and flesh to mortality and death. I had already under the Japanese mental school that dealt with the acceptance of death, perhaps that helped.
huxley; Lloyd:
I’ll try to tackle that poem huxley posted (and I won’t even cheat by reading what anyone else has to say about it).
The first stanza is self-explanatory, so I won’t bother with that one. But after that I think he’s saying something like this: just as it was dark before I flipped that switch and illuminated everything in the room, in that same way she (an actual woman, Schwartz’s beloved of the moment or the year or the decade, maybe even a wife) might have remained unseen and unknown by me. But somehow, we met (“the intercourse of lives miraculous and dear”), and what was previously dark and unknown to me (his beloved, the “she” of the poem) is now miraculously known and illuminated.
Third stanza just describes the illuminated moment. Fourth stanza says he wants the whole world to have those qualities, always—despite its impermanence (he doesn’t even know if his beloved will be around for long: “For what assures her present every year?”). The last line is a hard one, but I think what he means by “in dark accidents” is that we encounter people by chance, as though stumbling around in the dark, and yet those “dark accidents” can lead us to love and grace.
neo: Not too shabby! You hit all the bases. Work for me.
According to wiki:
In 1937, [Schwartz] married Gertrude Buckman, a book reviewer for Partisan Review, whom he divorced after six years.
I was surprised you were able to make it work with a real woman. I started there, then switched to some grander notion that she was the Darkness/Unknown and her necessary relationship to life, blah blah, but it didn’t really click.
Lloyd: Schwartz was more of a philosophical cove — he studied under Whitehead at Harvard — than a mystical one.
I doubt the poem reflected a glimpse of Enlightenment.
Delmore Schwartz had an unhappy life. He was cheated out of an inheritance. He failed to fulfill his early promise as a writer. He became alcoholic and, I believe, he was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. He died relatively young and broke in the Bowery.
It was his own good luck he died alone. This is a very charitably written, and to my mind inaccurate, account of Chris Farley’s death.
http://reelreviews.com/shorttakes/farley.htm
Let it be known to your sons. If you don’t want it in a headline above the fold where your grandma can read it, don’t do it. Choices. He dies wheezing on the floor, begging the hooker not to leave him who, leaves him.
April 1937 would have been the point in the great depression when wages and corp. profits had recovered to their levels prior to the crash of ’29, though unemployment was still high. By July or August of ’37 there was a recessionary crash within the overall depression which I believe was particularly heartbreaking for many.
Was the poem really written close to April, or later when things were much more bleak? April would have then seemed so poignant.
The author reflects on who father and Eleanor were back then, 7 years ago. Seven and a half years ago would have been prior to crash of ’29 when Delmore’s father Harry was a wealthy property owner (and rentier I suppose), according to Wikipedia. Harry died in 1930, and Delmore received very little from his estate supposedly because of a bad executor, though I’m sure the crash had a big or dominant effect. Was Delmore the pauper?
I think I read Humbolt’s Gift and Henderson the Rain King but the latter is the only one I remember from my teen years. The one I really remember from age 19 or so, was You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe. It is a detailed impressionistic account of the end of the roaring twenties and then the crash. Wolfe’s narrator going home again gives us a look at a small town in the south, and his new home is NYC. Executives falling from 20th story windows and many other aberrations are chronicled.
TommyJay: Nice exposition!
In 1937 Schwartz’s literary career was just about to take off with his short story collection, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” He was 24 years-old, brilliant. He wasn’t a pauper.
I think that title comes from Yeats. The short story, same title, sounded great but I never found a copy to read.
Perhaps my favorite poet, Frank O’Hara, got off a mildly snarky reply in his great poem “Memorial Day, 1950”:
Our responsibilities did not begin in dreams, though they began in bed.
https://newyorkschoolpoets.wordpress.com/2016/05/30/frank-ohara-memorial-day-1950/
That one is also my favorite of his poetry, and I posted here in the comments a few weeks ago though I no longer remember why, but it probably had something do with time and how it accelerates as I age- it is the poem I always think of when that subject comes up.
And I was right: http://neoneocon.com/2018/01/08/times-acceleration/
huxley:
Here you go:
neo: Read by Lou Reed no less!
I’ll Audacity it to a flash and play it in the car.
What brought you to Delmore Schwartz?
who would know the depth
of infinity runs in the crowd
around one
but the who who knows it and the ones one knows.
for each is born to bear
and the lucky among us bare it.
God bless Delmore
God bless Lou
God bless Neo
God bless you
thank you for sparing me of the news this Sunday –
faked and baked and caked –
and for reminding me of olds.
Ymar Sakar –
Very curious to see your “Rabbinical sources” for fasting – mortification of the flesh and monastic withdrawal are entirely Christian ideas, rejected by Judaism.
The material world parallels the spiritual. By performing the commandments we connect every aspect of life to its higher spiritual root. The ultimate goal is the “day that is all Sabbath” – making this world fit for G-d’s indwelling presence.
Neo – a great poem from a poet I have never heard of. Thank you.
I’m with Geoffrey:
Geoffrey Britain Says:
February 24th, 2018 at 5:03 pm
********
I guess I am just a redneck.
But literate!
Why is it so many poets flame out on drugs and/or booze, just like our wondrous rock musicians of the past 50 years?
Perhaps they have found a different “answer”.
Frog:
Creativity and manic depression (bipolar) are somewhat linked. Schwartz was almost certainly bipolar, and before the days of lithium he was self-medicating with other substances.
There is also a Romantic view among some poets—especially during the mid-20th century, but also in other eras—that dissipation and wild living is an intrinsic part of the poetic process. But bipolar disease is and was a big part of it, or at least was a big part of it in pre-lithium times.
There also have been many poets who led very sober lives. But Delmore Schwartz was not among them.
huxley:
I actually think that what made me think of Schwartz again was this from Yancey Ward. But I am pretty sure I had read “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” in some short story collection when I was quite young. And I’ve long liked the poem “The Heavy Bear.” I am also nearly positive I had encountered “Calmly We Walk” many years ago, but it didn’t make as big an impression then as it did when Yancey Ward brought it up. I think that has something to do with being older now.
neo: Just curious.
Delmore Schwartz is fairly obscure today, though when he was young he was lauded by the Big Guns of American poetry — Eliot, Pound, and Williams.
Aside from finding Schwartz in an anthology, I mostly knew him second-hand through other writers and Lou Reed, who’s in a class of his own.
huxley:
One of Schwartz’s poems is anthologized (at least, when I was younger it was), and that’s “The Heavy Bear”. I’m pretty sure I encountered that one a long time ago, and many times at that.
Very curious to see your “Rabbinical sources” for fasting — mortification of the flesh and monastic withdrawal are entirely Christian ideas, rejected by Judaism.
Those weren’t rabbinical sources for fasting, as Judaism in the modern world still uphold the feasts. I don’t see them using Indian or Buddhist rituals, unless it’s in Hebrew reformulation.
The rabbinical story was told by a rabbi as a metaphor. I then used the metaphor as an intro to the topic. That does not mean the rabbi was advocating fasting with that story (which I did not fully reproduce) however.
By performing the commandments we connect every aspect of life to its higher spiritual root.
Judaism uses dietary laws and rituals/feasts to create a temple of the body for the spirit. That’s not the nefesh but the spirit of god.
However, what came later were rabbinical commandments, not Torah commandments. The Torah commandments would be Leviticus+4, where spiritual cleansing is accomplished through blood and animal sacrifice. There is no blood and animal sacrifice in Judaism, because there is no temple, no third temple to do it at. So without the temple, Torah could not be followed. Mitzvoh or rabbinical commandments had to replace it in order to make it still work, but that is merely a human addition.
What does fasting have to do with blood and animal sacrifice to cleanse impurities at the temple? More on that later.
As for Judaism rejecting fasting… the rabbinical Judaism may have, but the religion of Moses had a lot of fasting but that is because all of Torah could be followed because of the temple and purification rituals.
Although the origins of the ritual of fasting are obscure, several current theories claim that it originated as (1) a spiritual preparation for partaking of a sacred meal (W.R. Smith); (2) a method for inducing a state of susceptibility to visions (E.B. Tylor); and (3) a means of providing new vitality during periods of human or natural infertility (T.H. Gaster). Scriptural citations have been adduced to support all these theories, but fasting in the Bible clearly emerged in response to more spiritual needs. The Hebrew root for fasting, ẓwm (צו×), can be used both as a verb and a noun, e.g., “David fasted a fast” (II Sam. 12:16), a meaning verified in the next verse: “he ate no food.” A synonymous idiom Ê¿innah nefesh (lit. “afflict the body”) includes fasting as part of a general regimen of abstinence, a broader meaning confirmed by the following:
(a) laws annulling women’s vows and oaths that contain the phrase “all self-denying oaths to afflict her body” (Num. 30:14, cf. verses 3, 7, 10—13), referring to all forms of abstinence, not just fasting; (b) Daniel, who expressly “afflicts himself” (Dan. 10:12) not only by abstaining from choice food, meat, and wine (in biblical terminology, he is not actually fasting) but also from anointing himself (10:3); and (c) the example of King David, who, in addition to fasting, sleeps on the ground, does not change his clothes, and refrains from anointing and washing (II Sam. 12:16—20, though the term Ê¿innah nefesh is absent). In biblical poetry ẓwm and Ê¿innah nefesh are parallel but not synonymous. Indeed, one verse (Isa. 58:5) indicates that it is rather the root ẓwm which has taken on the broader sense of Ê¿innah nefesh: “…that a man should bow his head like a bulrush and make his bed on sackcloth and ashes, is this what you call a fast…?” Thus, the rabbis declare that Ê¿innah nefesh, enjoined for the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16:29, 31; 23:27—32), consists not only of fasting but of other forms of self-denial such as abstention from “washing, anointing, wearing shoes, and cohabitation” (Yoma 8:1; cf. Targ. Jon., Lev. 16:29).
Fasting is attested in the oldest strata of biblical literature and there can be no doubt that spontaneous fasting was widespread from earliest times both among individuals and groups. In the ritual practiced in the First Temple, fasting was clearly a permanent feature (Isa. 1:13, lxx; Jer. 36:9, “before the Lord”; cf. Joel 1:14; 2:15—17). The death of a national leader (e.g., King Saul) could initiate a day-long fast (II Sam. 1:12), or, alternatively, the fast might be observed for seven days (I Sam. 31:13). The authority to proclaim a public fast was vested in the elders of the local community, who, however, could be pressured by the royal palace to proclaim a fast (e.g., for Naboth’s undoing, I Kings 21:8—12).
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/fasting-and-fast-days#1
I’m not an expert on modern day Judaism, only on the Ancient Hebrew Torah. And there was quite a lot of fasting/mortification of the flesh for the Israelis. The State of Israel only contains at best 1.5 tribes, not 12 tribes that would constitute Israel. The Tribe of Judah and Benjamine. Have they given up fasting/mortification of the flesh? If so, that’s their choice.
Jews, like Christians, should read their scriptures without priests or rabbis “interpreting” it for them. I cannot help but suspect the erroneous knowledge the Jews have about their tradition and their trust in the Torah, has a lot to do with their lack of knowledge of reading the Torah without a rabbi interpreting it for them. Gatekeepers are there to keep people in control, as it was for the Vatican.
If we needed gatekeepers to interpret every poem for us, it wouldn’t be very artistic or free. So long as people can read poems for themselves and interpret as much as they can, then they can also obtain additional interpretations later. But the idea that one can only read the bible if a Vatican leader allows it, or one can only read the Torah if a rabbi explains what it means, is problematic.
Sack cloth and ashes, mortification of the flesh. The Essenes were quite the monastic order.
Zig zag… it does it does….
As for poetry dealing with April, I Shall Not Care…
I Shall not Care
BY SARA TEASDALE
When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Tho’ you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.
I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough,
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.
Creativity and manic depression (bipolar) are somewhat linked.
neo: True. There have also been studies on poetry specifically such as this: I bask in dreams of suicide: Mental illness, poetry, and women
Though it focuses on women poets, much of it is applicable to poets generally:
In this section, we argue that several factors associated with poetry combine to produce an additive effect: the types of people who are drawn to poetry, the inability of poetry to assuage mental illness, the impact that the field has on poets, and a possible age effect. First, the nature and style of poetry draw people who may be more likely to be unstable. Second, unlike other forms of writing, poetry does not alleviate mental illness. Third, implicit expectations from the field may result in successful poets being expected to be ill. Finally, poets typically peak at a younger age, when mental illness is more likely to strike.
Milwaukee:
And of course April is the cruelest month.
I think my brain is running on a one cylinder 2 stroke engine while Jordan Peterson has a V12 engine purring like a cat.
The most impressive video of Jordan just yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofmuCXRMoSA
from January 30th.
Milwaukee: I sure heard a strong echo (“I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful/When rain bends down the bough”) in Teasdale from Yeats’ classic “Innisfree” though the intentions are quite different:
___________________________________________
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
___________________________________________
I first came across Schwartz in the Norton Anthology series while in grad school almost 30 years ago- I had filched the book from my oldest sister who was, at the time, of a more literary bent than I was. I don’t remember if it was this particular poem by Schwartz that caught my attention in the anthology, but I am pretty sure it was. In any case, I went the library and checked out a collection of his along with a book length poem that I never could finish- it was quite reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’sThe Wasteland, but not nearly as interesting. I did read some of his short stories, though I don’t really recall much of them these decades later. I still often search his poetry on-line these days when I feel the urge.
There is one cultural reference to the poem above- in the first Star Trek TNG feature film, Malcolm McDowell’s character paraphrases the line about time being fire in which we burn- one of the rare instances in which I didn’t have to struggle to remember from where a literary allusion came from.
In an almost empty universe a candle could be the sun… – artfldgr
“What am I now that I was then?”
This line hit me like your ton of bricks because I had the children and babies of your earlier line (“…and just about everyone who was around him on that day in the park (except some of the babies and children) is dead.”) still in my mind’s eye, as though looking back through time to my child self.
Very moving.
Baklava:
At first I thought you were way off topic with the Peterson link. Then I listened to it. He may not be a poet, but he certainly has the melancholy part down pat.
Short version: You’re born. You suffer. You look for meaning. You die never finding it.
My segue, like yours, may seem off topic but isn’t. I had the great pleasure of attending a local symphony concert Saturday evening. The surprise was a soloist opera singer named Natasha Czajka. She is a local girl in her senior year studying at the San Francisco Conservatory of music under renowned soprano Deborah Voigt. She sang the aria Mi Tradi qeull’alma ingrata” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
Her singing filled the theater with such beauty and power it was overwhelming. The nuance of her interpretation of Elvira, the woman scorned by Don Giovanni but still in love with him, was masterful. We were front seat balcony and could see the reaction of the audience as everyone stood and cheered. In the years I’ve attended local performances, I’ve never seen anything to match this.
There IS beauty and wonder in this world, in this life, in being.
http://northstatesymphony.org/masterworks-3/
Oh. Sadly, my immediate comment was lost.
😒