Delmore Schwartz

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.

Delmore Schwartz (December 8 1913 – July 11 1966) was an American poet and short story writer.

Quotes

Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)

• 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:
  This is the school in which we learn,
  Time is the fire in which we burn.
  • "Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day" (full text online); this poem has also been printed under the title "For Rhoda"

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…

Whence, if ever, shall come the actuality
Of a voice speaking the mind's knowing,
The sunlight bright on the green windowshade,
And the self articulate, affectionate, and flowing,
Ease, warmth, light, the utter showing,
When in the white bed all things are made.

How could I think the brief years were enough
To prove the reality of endless love?

• I am my father's father,
  You are your children's guilt.
  
  In history's pity and terror
  The child is Aeneas again;
  
  Troy is in the nursery,
  The rocking horse is on fire.
  
  Child labor! The child must carry
  His fathers on his back.
  • "The Ballad of the Children of the Czar"

• A car coughed, starting. Morning softly
  Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair
  From underseas, kindled the looking-glass,
  Distinguished the dresser and the white wall.
  The bird called tentatively, whistled, called,
  Bubbled and whistled, so! Perplexed, still wet
  With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so,
  O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail
  Of early morning, the mystery of the beginning
  Again and again,
  while history is unforgiven.
  • "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave"

• Whence, if ever, shall come the actuality
  Of a voice speaking the mind's knowing,
  The sunlight bright on the green windowshade,
  And the self articulate, affectionate, and flowing,
  Ease, warmth, light, the utter showing,
  When in the white bed all things are made.
  • "Sonnet: O City, City"

• 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.

  • "The Beautiful American Word, Sure"

• How the false truths of the years of youth have passed!
  Have passed at full speed like trains which never stopped
  There where I stood and waited, hardly aware,
  How little I knew, or which of them was the one
  To mount and ride to hope or where true hope arrives.
  • "I am a Book I neither Wrote nor Read"

• I no more wrote than read that book which is
  The self I am, half hidden as it is
  From one and all who see within a kiss
  The lounging formless blackness of an abyss.

  How could I think the brief years were enough
  To prove the reality of endless love?

  • "I am a Book I neither Wrote nor Read"

• But this, this which we say before we’re sorry,
  This which we live behind our unseen faces,
  Is neither dream, nor childhood, neither
  Myth, nor landscape, final, nor finished,
  For we are incomplete and know no future,
  And we are howling or dancing out our souls
  In beating syllables before the curtain:
  We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.
  • "Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Strangers"

• That inescapable animal walks with me,
  Has followed me since the black womb held,
  Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
  A caricature, a swollen shadow,
  A stupid clown of the spirit's motive,
  Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
  The secret life of belly and bone.
  • "The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me"

Quotes about Delmore Schwartz

• My tattered Oscar Williams 1943 anthology, with the beautiful faces of Rukeyser, Schwartz
  • 1993 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley

External links

• Delmore Schwartz page at the Academy of American Poets