"The World Was Warm and White When It Was Born"

SONNET

The world was warm and white when I was born:
Beyond the window pane the world was white,
A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,
Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light.
Although the whiteness was almond and was bone
In midnight's still paralysis, nevertheless
The world was warm and hope was infinite
All things would come, fulfilled, all things

would be known

all things would be enjoyed, fulfilled, AND COME TO BE MY OWN. and known.

How like a summer the years of youth have passed!
-- How like the summer of 1914, in all truth! --
Patience, my soul, the truth is never known
Until the future has become the past
And then, only, when the love of truth at last
Becomes the truth of love, when both are one,
Then, then, then, Eden becomes Utopia and is surpassed:
For then the dream is knowledge and knowledge knows
Motive and joy at once wherever it goes.

Delmore Schwartz

THE CONCLUSION
POEM

How slow time moves when torment stops the clock!
How dormant and delinquent, under the dawn,
The uproarious roaring of the bursting cock:
Now pain ticks on, now all and nothing must be borne,
And I remember: pain is the cost of being born.

II

For when the flowers of infatuation fade
The furs which love in all its warmth discloses
Become the fires of pride and are betrayed
By those whom love has terrified and pride has
made afraid.

No matter what time prepares, no matter how time amazes
The images and hopes by which we love or die,
Pride is not love, and pride is merely pride,
Until it becomes a living death which denies
How it is treacherous, and faithless: how it betrays
Everyone, one by one, and every vow,
Seeking praise absolute, hides with other whores
Whom pride and time seduces and love ignores.

POEM

2

III

This will be true long after heart and heart
Have recognized and forgotten all that was ripening,
ripe, rotten-ripe and rotten:
Have known too soon, too soon by far how much of love
has been forgotten:
Have known the little deaths before death do us part:
Nothing will ever pass at last to nothingness beyond
decay
Until the night is all, and night is known all day.

Delmore Schwartz

# The Sequel

First love is first death. There is no other.

There is no death. But all men live forever

And die forever. If this were not true,

We would be more deceived, still more deceived

Than this belief deceives us, whether or not

We think that we believe or we think

Those who believe are deceived. But to believe

That death is the sweet asylum of nothingness

Is the cruel sick dream of the criminal and the suicide:

Of those who deny reality, of those who steal from consciousness

Of those who are often fugitive, of those who are afraid to love

and to live,

Of those who are terrified by love, and

Those who try -- before they

Try to die -- to disappear

And hide.

Delmore Schwartz

THE WINTER TWILIGHT, GLOWING BLACK AND GOLD

That time of year you may in me behold
When Christmas trees are blaz[ing] on the walk,
Raging against the stale snow and the cold
And low sky's bundled wash, deadwhite as chalk.

Hissing and raven[bus] the brilliant plant:
Rising like eagerness, a rushing pyre
As when the tutti foams up and the chant
Soars up, --hurrahing!--from the Easter choir).

But this is only true at four o'clock.

At noon the fifth year is again abused:
I bring a distant girl apples and cake,
Marbles, picturrs, secrets, my swollen heart
Now boxed in the learning and music of art:
But once more, as before, accepted and refused.

# All of the Fruits Have Fallen

## All of the Fruits Have Fallen

ALL of the fruits had fallen,
The bears had fallen asleep,
And the pears were useless and
soft
Like used hopes, under the starlight's
Small knowledge, scattered aloft
In a glittering senseless drift:
The jackals of remorse in a cage
Drugged beyond mirth and rage.

Then, then, the dark hour flowered!
Under the silence, immense
And empty as far off seas,
I wished for the innocence
Of my stars and my stones and my
trees.

All the brutality and inner sense
A dog and a bird possess,
The dog who barked at the moon
As an enemy's white fang,
The bird that thrashed up the bush
And soared to soar as it sang,
A being all present as touch,
Free of the future and past
—Until, in the dim window glass,
The fog or cloud of my face
Showed me my fear at last!

DELMORE SCHWARTZ

DELMORE SCHWARTZ

443

And then, once again, the entire choir shall evry out in unity,
Singing and celebrating love and love's victory,
Ascending and descending the heights of assent, chanting
triumphantly:

"Before the morning was, you were:
Before the snow shone;
And the light sang, and the stone,
Abiding, rode the fulness, or endured the emptiness,
You were; you were alone."

## POEM

### (The Foggy, Foggy Playboy)

When I was a young man, I lived to write poems
And I called a spade a spade

And the only only thing that made me sing
Was to lift the masks at the masquerade.

I took them from my own face,
I took them off others too

And the only only wrong in all my song
Was the view that I knew what was true.

Now I am older and tireder too
And the tasks with the masks are quite trying.

I'd gladly gladly stop if I only only knew
A better way to keep from lying,

And not get nervous and blue
When I said something quite untrue:

I looked all around and all over

To find something else to do:

I tried to be less romantic

I tried to be less starry-eyed too:

But I only got mixed up and frantic

Forgetting what was false and what was true.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

2.

The Bullet of the Fifth Year
Saint, Revolutionist
Cambridge, Spring 1937
Socrates' Ghost Must Haunt Me Now.
The Ballet of The Fifth Year

THE REPETITIVE HEART: Poems in imitation of the fugue
All Of Us Always Turning Away For Solace
Will you perhaps consent to be
All Clowns are masked and all personae
Calmly we walk through this April's Day
Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Strangers
Do The Others Speak of Me Mockingly, Maliciously
I Am To My Own Heart Merely A Serf
Abraham And Orpheus, Be With Me Now
The Heavy Bear who Goes With Me
A Dog Named Ego, The Snowflakes As Kisses
Time's Dedication

Coriolanus And His Mother: The Knowledge Of A Dream

Act One

Pleasure

Act Two

Justice

Act Three

There Was A City

Act Four

Choose

Act Four, Scene Two

There Was A Person

Act Five

TABLE OF CONTENTS

3.

II

SUMMER KNOWLEDGE

The Fulfillment

"At A Solemn Muſſck"

Darkling Summer, Ominous Dusk, Rumorous Rain

The Fulfillment

The First Morning Of The Second World

Summer Knowledge

Morning Bells

"I Am Cherry Alive", The Little Girl Sang

O Child, Do Not fear The Dark And Sleep's Possession

The True Blue American

Is It The Morning? Is it The Littke Morning?"

A A Small Score

A Little Morning Music

The Kingdom of Poetry

Gold Morning, Sweet Prince

Vivaldi

Sterne

Swift

Holderlin

Baudelaire

The Kingdom Of Poetry

TABLE OF CONTENTS

4.

The Dark And Falling Summer

"The World Was Warm And White When I was Born"

"I Am A Book I Neither Wrote Nor Read"

The Conclusion

The Sequel

"The Winter Twilight, Gloing Black And Gold"

"All of The Fruits Had Fallen

The Foggy, Foggy Blue

I Did Not Know The Truth Of Growing Trees

All Of Them Have Gone Away, Although They Once Were Near

I Did Not Know The Secrets Of Joy

"I Waken To A Calling"

The Deceptive Present, The Phoenix Year

May's Truth And May's Falsehood

How Strange Love Is, In Every State of Consciousness

The Brilliant Summer, Mounting And Ominous

During December's Death

A Dream Of Winter, Empty, Woolen, Ice-White And Brittle

"In The Green Morning, Now, Once More

The Phoenix Choir

Cupid's Chant

Psyche Pleads With Cupid

Narcissus: "The Mind Is An Ancient And Famous Capital"

"The Fear And The Dread Of The Mind Of The Others"

"The River Was The Emblem Of All Beauty: All

Abraham

Sarah

Jacob

Lincoln

Starlight

SUMMER KNOWLEDGE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I THE DREAM OF KNOWLEDGE

The Dreams Which Begin In Responsibilities

The Ballad of The Children of the Ozar #3

In the Naked Bed, In Plato 's Cave 139
At This Moment of Time 148?

The Beautiful American Word, Sure, 136
O Love, Sweet Animal 132

Father And Son 109
Far Rockaway 111

The Sin of Hamlet 130 ✓

Out of the Water-Colored Windows, When You Look
Someone Is Harshly Coughing As Before ~~+49~~
Tired And Unhappy, You Think Of Houses 137/8

In The Slight Ripple, The Mind Perceives The Heart ~~33~~ ✓
Concerning The Synthetic Unity of Apperception 136 ✓

Parlez-Vous Français? 132 ✓

By Circumstances Fed 133

A Young Child And His Pregnant Mother 125

Prothalamion 106

Faust In Old Age 117

The Ghosts Of James And Peirce In Harvard Yard 137, 136

O City, City 138

What Is To Be Given 124

For The One Who Would Take Man's Life In Their Hands 120

For The One Who Would Take Man's Life In Their Hands 119