442

VERSE

## "AT A SOLEMN MUSICK"

Let the musicians begin,
Let every instrument awaken and instruct us
In love's willing river and love's dear discipline:
We wait, silent, in consent and in the penance
Of patience, awaiting the serene exaltation
Which is the liberation and conclusion of expiation.

Now may the chief musician say:
"Lust and emulation have dwelt among us
Like barbarous kings: have conquered us:
Have inhabited our hearts: devoured and ravished
—With the savage greed and avarice of fire—
The substance of pity and compassion."

Now may all the players play:
"The river of the morning, the morning of the river
Flow out of the splendor of the tenderness of surrender."

Now may the chief musician say:
"Nothing is more important than summer."

And now the entire choir shall chant:
"How often the astonished heart,
Beholding the laurel,
Remembers the dead,
And the enchanted absolute,
Snow's kingdom, sleep's dominion."

Then shall the chief musician declare:
"The phoenix is the meaning of the fruit,
Until the dream is knowledge and knowledge is a dream."

DELMORE SCHWARTZ

441

ONCE AND FOR ALL

Once, when I was a boy,
Apollo summoned me

To be apprenticed to the endless summer of light and
consciousness,

And thus to become and be what poets often have been,

A shepherd of being, a riding master of being, holding the sun-
god's horses, leading his sheep, training his eagles,

Directing the constellations to their stations, and to each grace
of place.

But the goat-god, piping and dancing, speaking an unknown
tongue or the language of the magician,

Sang from the darkness or rose from the underground, whence
arise

Love and love's drunkenness, love and birth, love and death,
love and rebirth

Which are the beginning of the Phoenix festivals, the tragic plays
in celebration of Dionysus,

And in mourning for his drunken and fallen princes, the singers
and sinners, fallen because they are, in the end,
Drunken with pride, blinded by joy.

And I followed Dionysus, forgetting Apollo. I followed him
far too long until I was wrong and chanted:

"One cannot serve both Gods. One must choose and lose."

But I was wrong and when I knew how I was wrong I knew
What, in a way, I had known all along:

This was the new world, here I belonged, here I was wrong
because

Here every tragedy has a happy ending, and any error may be
A fabulous discovery of Americans of the opulence hidden in
the dark depths and glittering heights of reality.

I

A tattering of rain and then the reign
Of pour and pouring-down and down,
Where in the westward gathered the filming gown
Of grey and clouding weakness, and, in the mane
Of the light's glory and the day's splendor, gold and vain,
Vivid, more and more vivid, scarlet, lucid and more luminous,
Then came a splatter, a prattle, a blowing rain!
And soon the hour was musical and rumorous:
A softness of a dripping lipped the isolated houses,
A gaunt grey somber softness licked the glass of hours.

II

Again, after a catbird squeaked in the special silence,
And clouding vagueness fogged the windowpane
And gathered blackness and overcast, the mane
Of light's story and light's glory surrendered and ended
-- A pebble -- a ring -- a ringing on the pane,
A blowing and a blowing in: tides of the blue and cold
Moods of the great blue bay, and slates of grey
Came down upon the land's great sea, the body of this day
-- Hardly an atom of silence amid the roar
Allowed the voice to form appeal -- to call:
By kindled light we thought we saw the bronze of fall.

Delmore Schwartz

"At A Solemn Musick"

Let the musicians begin,

Let every instrument instruct us

In love's willing river, and love's dear discipline:

Of patient, awaiting the serene exaltation

Like barbarous kings: have conquered us!

Have inhabited our hearts, devoured and ravished

With the savage greed and avarice of fire --

Now may all the players play:

The river of the morning, the morning of the river,

Flow from the splendor of the tenderness of surrender

There where descent and ascent are one in the south
and north of consent.

Solemn Musick

2

How often the astonished heart,
Beholding the lure,
Remembers the dead,
And the enchanted absolute,
Snow's kingdom, sleep's dominion.

"The phoenix is the meaning of the fruit,
Until the dream is knowledge, and knowledge is a dream."

And then once again the entire choir shall cry in unity:

Singing and celebrating love's rapture and love's victory,
Ascending the heights of assent, climbing and chanting
triumphantly:

Before the morning was, you were:

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

CORIOLANUS AND HIS MOTHER:
THE DREAM OF ONE PERFORMANCE.

THE DREAM OF KNOCKS 6-6

ONE

"O ME! MAKE YOU A SWORD OF ME!"

Theatre, the place to stare, rustle of programs,
Many have come, are being seated. The house
Is full, the audience is distinguished,
And in a box-seat sit five ghosts, and one,
A boy with guttural voice full of emotion.
The lights dim, half-darkness now accents
The footlights' glitter before the curtain. The curtain
Rises on the heart of man,

Rome, Rome,
The history-ridden arena shown by
A temple painted on a canvas backdrop;
On fluted columns, fat and white, there rests
The pediment wherein a writhing frieze
Of armed men strain to kill the other team
World without end, world without end of hatred.

The rumor of a crowd comes near. Many
Come crowding on the stage, bunched in their anger,
Holding aloft their clubs, their staves, their torches,
Knowing a mob's emotion.

Hunger, debts,
Poverty bring this demonstration. One,
Brutus, articulate, using their interest,
Mounts near the temple, tells them what they mean:

"Two years ago, you poor people one day
Gathered together; one encouraging another,
You all forsook the city, stood upon
A height beside the Tiber, made no show
Of actual rebellion, except to cry,

As you marched up and down the meager height:
'The rich men drive us from the city. The rich men
'Leave us no air, no water, nor even ground
'To bury our dead. To live in Rome, to live
'Tin this great city is to be used and slain

NORTH'S PLUTARCH

PSYCHE PLEADS WITH CUPID

2.

I come and say to them that God has captured and kidnapped me!

Dearest, is all love dark? Must all love be

Hidden in night from the one who is nearest?

Or is the mystery of divinity an abyss of black?

How then can you come to me? why do you come back?

Why do you desire my love? Is it love, in truth, if I lack

The sight and vision which begins all intimacy?

Delmore Schwartz

NARCISSUS

THE MIND IS AN ANCIENT AND FAMOUS CAPITAL

The mind is a city like London,
Smoky and populous: it is a capital
Like Rome, ruined and eternal,
Marked by the monuments which no one
Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains
Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces,
Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled.
The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins
Of every haunted, hunted generation's celebration.

"Call us what you will: we are made such by love.",
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and
Our little lives are ruled by the gods, by Pan,
Piping of all, seeking to grasp or grasping
All of the grapes; and by the bow-and-arrow god,
Cupid, piercing the heart through, suddenly and forever.

Dusk we are, to dusk returning, after the burbing,
After the gold fall, the fallen ash, the bronze,
Scattered and rotten, after the white null statues which
Are winter, sleep, and nothingness: when
Will the houselights of the universe
Light up and blaze??

For it is not the sea
Which murmurs in a shell,
And it is not only the heart, at harp o'clock,
It is the dread terror of the uncontrollable
Horses of the apocalypse, running in wild dread
Toward Arcturus--and returning as suddenly....

NARCISSUS

THE FEAR AND DREAD OF THE MIND OF THE OTHERS

(Fear and hatred of the others)

-- The others were the despots of despair --

The river's freshness sailed from unknown sources --

... They snickered giggled, laughed aloud at last,
They mocked and marvelled at the statue which was
A caricature, as strained and stiff, and yet
A statue of self-love! -- since self-love was
To them, truly my true love, how, then, was I
a stillness of nervousness

So nervous a caricature: did they suppose
Self-love was unrequited, or betrayed?

They thought I had fallen in love with my own face
-- Thinking that I had fallen in love with my own face,
And this belief became the night-like obstacle
To understanding all my unbroken suffering
My studious self-regard, the pain of hope,
The torment of possibility:

How then could I have expected them to see me
As I saw myself, within my gaze, or see
to me

That being thus seemed as a toad, a frog, a wen, a mole,
a wen,
a mole?

Knowing their certainty that I was only

A monument, a monster who had fallen in love

The Fear And Dread Of The Mind Of The Others (2)

Knowing their certainty that I was only
A monument, a monster who had fallen in love
With himself alone, how could I have
Told them what was in me, within my heart, trembling and
passionate

Within the labryinth and caves of my mind, which is
Like every mind partly or wholly hidden from itself?
The words for what is in my heart and in my mind
Do not exist. But I must seek and search to find
and orchards

Amid the vines of the vivid world of day

Approximate images, imaginary parallels

For what is my heart and dark within my mind:
Comparisons and mere metaphors: for all

Of them are substitutes, both counterfeit and vague:
They are, at most, deceptive resemblances,

False in their very likeness, like the sons
Who are alike and kin and more unlike and less

Because they seem the father's very self: but each one is
--Although begotten by the same father-- himself,
The unique self, each is unique, like every other one,
And everything thing, older or younger, nevertheless
nonesuch

Aionate no one who has before has been.

Do you hear, do you see? Do you understand me now, and how
The words for what is my heart do not exist?

NARCISSUS

-- Surely they would have laughed again, renewed
their scorn,

Giggled and snickered, cruel. Surely have said
This is the puerile mania of the obsessed,

The living logic of the lunatic:

I was the statue of their merriment,

Dead and a death, Pharoah and monster forsaken and lost.

... My faces were my apes: my apes became
Performers in the Sundays of their parks,
Buffoons or clowns in the farce or comedy
When they took pleasure in knowing that they were not
like me

... I waited like obsession in solitude:
The sun's white terror tore and roared at me,
The moonlight, almond white, at night,
Whether awake or sleeping, arrested me
And sang, softly, haunted, unlike the sun
But as the sun. Withheld from me or took away
Despair or peace, making me once more
With thoughts of what had never been before --

NARCISSUS!

"THE RIVER WAS THE EMERALD OF ALL BEAUTY! ALC.

The river was the abundant belly of beauty itself
The river was the dream space where I walked,
The river was itself and yet it was -- flowing and
freshening --

A self anew, another self, or self renewed
At every tick of eternity, and by each glint of light
Mounting or spilling, descending to shade and black
-- Had I but told them my heart, told how it was
Taunted at noon and pacified at dusk, at starfall midnight
Strong in hope once more, ever in eagerness
Jumping like joy, would they have heard? How could they?
How, when what they knew was, like the grass,
Simple and certain, known through the truth of touch,
another form and fountain of falsehood's
fecundity --

Gazing upon their faces as they gazed
Could they have seen my faces as whores who are
Holy and deified as priestesses of hope.

-- the sacred virgins of futurity --
Promising dear divinity precisely because
They were disfigured ducks who might become
And be, and ever beloved, white swans, noble and beautiful
Could they have seen how my faces were
Bonfires of worship and vigil, blazes of adoration
and hope