The New Neo

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a post originally published five years ago. Gerard had made the first comment on the original post, as you can see if you follow that link. “Many great dears are taken away…”]

—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.