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 private parts which I disclose
To those who know what a poem knows.
poem by Delmore Schwartz
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What Is To Be Given
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, for riches.
Yet let me now be careful
Not to give too much
To one so shy and fearful
For like a gun is touch.
poem by Delmore Schwartz
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Albert Einstein To Archibald Macleish
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 -- majesty!
(O modesty aside, forgive my fallen pride, O hidden
majesty,
The lamp, the lantern, the lucid light he sought for
All too often -- sick humanity!)
poem by Delmore Schwartz
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Yeats Died Saturday In France
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 staring face.
No ability, no dignity
Can fail him now who trained so long
For the outrage of eternity,
Teaching his heart to beat a song
In which man's strict humanity,
Erect as a soldier, became a tongue.
poem by Delmore Schwartz
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Poem (In the morning, when it was raining)
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 over all
The colorless curtains of the ceaseless spontaneous fall.
poem by Delmore Schwartz
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O Love, Sweet Animal
O Love, dark animal,
With your strangeness go
Like any freak or clown:
Appease tee child in her
Because she is alone
Many years ago
Terrified by a look
Which was not meant for her.
Brush your heavy fur
Against her, long and slow
Stare at her like a book,
Her interests being such
No one can look too much.
Tell her how you know
Nothing can be taken
Which has not been given:
For you time is forgiven:
Informed by hell and heaven
You are not mistaken
poem by Delmore Schwartz
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By Circumstances Fed
By circumstances fed
Which divide attention
Among the living and the dead,
Under the blooms of the blossoming sun,
The gaze which is a tower towers
Day and night, hour by hour,
Critical of all and of one,
Dissatisfied with every flower
With all that's been done or undone,
Converting every feature
Into its own and unknown nature;
So, once in the drugstore,
Amid all the poppy, salve and ointment,
I suddenly saw, estranged there,
Beyond all disappointment,
My own face in the mirror.
poem by Delmore Schwartz
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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 by Delmore Schwartz
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The Sin Of Hamlet
The horns in the harbor booming, vaguely,
Fog, forgotten, yesterday, conclusion,
Nostalgic, noising dim sorrow, calling
To sleep is it? I think so, and childhood,
Not the door opened and the stair descended,
The voice answered, the choice announced, the
Trigger touched in the sharp declaration!
And when it comes, escape is small; the door
Creaks; the worms of fear spread veins; the furtive
Fugitive, looking backward, sees his
Ghost in the mirror, his shameful eyes, his mouth diseased.
poem by Delmore Schwartz
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Concerning The Synthetic Unity Of Apperception
"Trash, trash!" the king my uncle said,
"The spirit's smoke and weak as smoke ascends.
"Sit in the sun and not among the dead,
"Eat oranges! Pish tosh! the car attends.
"All ghosts came back. they do not like it there,
"No silky water and no big brown bear,
"No beer and no siestas up above."
"Uncle," I said, "I'm lonely. What is love?"
This drove him quite insane. Now he must knit
Time and apperception, bit by tiny bit.
poem by Delmore Schwartz
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