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During December’s Death by Delmore Schwartz

By T.

10 July 2011

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During December's Death
Delmore Schwartz

The afternoon turned dark early;
The light suddenly faded;
The dusk was black although, elsewhere, the first star in the cold
sky suddenly whistled;
And I thought I heard the fresh scraping of the flying steel of boys
on roller skates
Rollicking over the asphalt in 1926,
And I thought I heard the dusk and silence raided
By a calm voice commanding consciousness:
Wait: wait: wait as if you had always waited
And as if it had always been dark
And as if the world had been from the beginning
A lost and drunken ark in which the only light
Was the dread and white of the terrified animals’ eyes.
And then, turning on the light, I took a book
That I might gaze upon another’s vision of the abyss of conscious-
ness—
The hope, and the pain of hope, and the patience of hope, and its
torment, its astonishment, its endlessness.

MARGINALIA

Ah, poetry. What would my life have been without you. I’m a mess, with all these words at my disposal, but even more so without them.

ABOUT DELMORE SCHWARTZ

Delmore Schwartz was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 8, 1913, to Romanian Jewish parents. In 1936 Schwartz won the Bowdoin Prize in the Humanities for his essay “Poetry as Imitation,” and in 1937 his short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” was published in Partisan Review. Schwartz published several more books of poetry and prose during his lifetime, including Genesis: Book One (New Directions, 1938), a book-length poem; Vaudeville for a Princess and Other… (more)