Great poems
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For The One Who Would Not Take His Life In His Hands
© Delmore Schwartz
Athlete, virtuoso,
Training for happiness,
Bend arm and knee, and seek
The body's sharp distress,
Socrates Ghost Must Haunt Me Now
© Delmore Schwartz
Socrates ghost must haunt me now,
Notorious death has let him go,
He comes to me with a clumsy bow,
Saying in his disused voice,
Prothalamion
© Delmore Schwartz
"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."
He Knows All There Is To Know. Now He Is Acquainted With The Day And Night
© Delmore Schwartz
Whose wood this is I think I know:
He made it sacred long ago:
He will expect me, far or near
To watch that wood immense with snow.
Poem (In the morning, when it was raining)
© Delmore Schwartz
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:
From: A King Of Kings, A King Among The Kings
© Delmore Schwartz
Come, let us rejoice in James Joyce, in the greatness of this poet,
king, and king of poets
For he is our poor dead king, he is the monarch and Caesar of English,
he is the veritable King of the King's English
The Greatest Thing In North America
© Delmore Schwartz
Under the famous names upon the pediment:
Thales, Aristotle,
Cicero, Augustine, Scotus, Galileo,
Joseph, Odysseus, Hamlet, Columbus and Spinoza,
Anna Karenina, Alyosha Karamazov, Sherlock Holmes.
Apollo Musagete, Poetry, And The Leader Of The Muses
© Delmore Schwartz
O the endless fecundity of poetry is equaled
By its endless inexhaustible freshness, as in the discovery
of America and of poetry.
The Choir And Music Of Solitude And Silence
© Delmore Schwartz
Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage.
Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of
love.
Albert Einstein To Archibald Macleish
© Delmore Schwartz
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),
Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day
© Delmore Schwartz
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
Late Autumn In Venice
© Delmore Schwartz
(After Rilke)
The city floats no longer like a bait
To hook the nimble darting summer days.
The glazed and brittle palaces pulsate and radiate
Love And Marilyn Monroe
© Delmore Schwartz
Let us praise, to say it again, her spiritual pride
And admire one who delights in what she has and is
(Who says also: "A woman is like a motor car:
She needs a good body."
And: "I sun bathe in the nude, because I want
to be blonde all over.")
Occasional Poems
© Delmore Schwartz
I'll drink to thee only with my eyes
When two are three and four,
And guzzle reality's rise and cries
And praise the truth beyond surmise
When small shots shout: More! More! More! More!
To Helen
© Delmore Schwartz
O Sea! ... 'Tis I, risen from death once more
To hear the waves' harmonious roar
And see the galleys, sharp, in dawn's great awe
Raised from the dark by the rising and gold oar.
All Night, All Night
© Delmore Schwartz
Looked out at the night, unable to distinguish
Lights in the towns of passage from the yellow lights
Numb on the ceiling. And the bird flew parallel and still
As the train shot forth the straight line of its whistle,
Forward on the taut tracks, piercing empty, familiar --
Out Of The Watercolored Window, When You Look
© Delmore Schwartz
When from the watercolored window idly you look
Each is but and clear to see, not steep:
So does the neat print in an actual book
Marching as if to true conclusion, reap
The illimitable blue immensely overhead,
The night of the living and the day of the dead.
Ocean: An Ode. Concluding With A Wish.
© Edward Young
Sweet rural scene Of flocks and green!
At careless ease my limbs are spread;
All nature still, But yonder rill;
And listening pines nod o'er my head:
The Channel Swimmer
© Marriott Edgar
Would you hear a Wild tale of adventure
Of a hero who tackled the sea,
A super-man swimming the ocean,
Then hark to the tale of Joe Lee.
Sam's Racehorse
© Marriott Edgar
When Sam Small retired from the Army
He'd a pension of ninepence a day,
And seven pounds fourteen and twopence
He'd saved from his rations and pay.
