For neither amnesty nor forgiveness is bestowed upon poets, poetry and poems,
For William James, the lovable genius of Harvard
spoke the terrifying truth: “Your friends may forget, God may forgive you, But the brain cells record
your acts for the rest of eternity.”
What a terrifying thing to say!
This is the endless doom, without remedy, of poetry.
This is also the joy everlasting of poetry.
Unpublished Poems
Editor’s note
Robert Phillips, in editing Last & Lost Poems, thoroughly combed Schwartz’s papers, which are held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. That volume represents the poems Schwartz brought near to complete or publishable form. I found the two pieces that follow through my own research in the Schwartz archive; the pages I found were typescripts with handwritten changes and subsequent drafts written on the same sheet. These were not poems Schwartz intended to publish, at least not in this form; there may have been subsequent drafts that I did not find or that no longer exist.
Nonetheless, I think they will be of interest to the reader. The first is a birthday poem to Schwartz’s first wife, Gertrude Buckman. The second is a longer draft of a poem written as Schwartz’s marriage to Buckman was ending; a short version appears in James Atlas’s biography, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of An American Poet.
In both cases, I did my best to interpret Schwartz’s handwriting and draft sequences to assemble as finished versions as possible of the poems. To my knowledge, they haven’t been published before in these versions.
A Poem For Gertrude’s Birthday (1937)
Where the will moves, time is
And it’s your will I wish
Which is the truth of every kiss,
Beneath its butter-like touch:
For you are beautiful
For death is in your look,
Yet your joy is every joy
Which is remarkable.
But by no machine is luck
Only by the temporal clock
Can I grasp and wholly take
That new will of twenty-five
(Original, day by day
As every moment has its play
And the kings and ghosts arrive,
Only in time, the orange West,
O sister, doll, and animal,
Can I arrive at your rich breast
And taste the gift of your sweet will
Doggerel Beneath the Skin [fragment]
Poor Schwartz! Poor Schwartz!
Love anyway to all of them!
And may they live to see the peace
When no one has to drink to live
And work without hysteria,
Self-pity and insomnia,
Poor Schwartz! Poor Schwartz!
Self-doubt and sun deliria!
Poor Blackmur and poor Schwartz!
Poor Schwartz, he meant well anyway?
But all for parents loves must pay!
Poor Berryman! Poor Schwartz,
All poet’s wives have rotten lives,
Their husbands look at them like knives,
Exactitude their livelihood
The audience would have them miss
Poor Gertrude, poor Eileen
(No longer seventeen)
But back to children, not yet done,
(The infamy has just begun!)
When Sage bathed in the Swishe’s house,
with joy came in and looked,
— And all looked on
Sage stared right back, cold, bored, polite
(This was an act Keith would have booked!),
While Susie glittered in the light!
And now with sudden happiness,
I think of last year’s New Year’s Eve,
(When Nela falls on Hortin’s stairs,
Strange God is kind or he is luck),
And if God is, or is good luck
Some of us may enjoy a duck!
VERSE DRAMA
DR. BERGEN’S BELIEF
PERSONS OF THE PLAY
Anthony Norman: Mrs. Bergen
Dr. Newman: Martha Bergen
Dr. Bergen: Dr. Bergen’s Disciples
INTRODUCTION
[A room bare of all but an oval mirror and a table before which DR. BERGEN stands, regarding himself as he rehearses his speech, as if assuming an audience in an auditorium.]
DR. BERGEN:
There seems to be no Santa Claus. The air
Is free, the park’s nature open until
Ten o’clock comes once more, the starlight admirable,
The unemployed unobtrusive, the traffic’s hum
Subdued as one’s attention shifts,
but otherwise
A final emptiness confronts your eyes.
For otherwise, there is no Santa Claus,
Though the scene shifts to the seashore at dusk
— The summer over, the carousel rusts,
The twilight is cold, it is October—
Where he who walks in solitude, who pauses
At last upon the verge of rocks, dim, dim,
Gazing upon the curled and curling waters,
Does not look up unto the curving sky
Sure that his fate must be coherent there.
The sky is merely dim and vacancy
Through which the airman may ascend for years
And not hear any word, not one, nor see
A face intelligent amid the clouds
Unless the bulged face of the clouds’ heaped-up
And foaming coma.
If he lifted his arms
And bent his knee and bowed his head, what would
He to his own self seem? Grotesque, grotesque,
The sad comedian of cane and derby
Collapsed upon the pavement.
Prayer is now
Ridiculous. Appeal, apostrophe,
And invocation are but mutterings,
Turning from side to side in ignorant sleep.
No one regards you, no one cares for you, none
Shall find cake on the pavement, none
Shall have the past forgiven, and no one
Hears the benevolent white-bearded one
Descend the chimney, rise in the elevator,
Arrive to dispense gratis and for no toil
All justice, loving-kindness, and good will.
But every side is wrong, but every man
Is guilty, every child is used, and now
Effort is useful as spitting in the sea,
Good and evil are merely expressions of pain
In the perpetual return of the blind night
And the bit by bit disorder of the rain.
When music makes the whole room radiant,
Spreading the dream of sweet societies
Where all dance out their gifts, their needs, their choices,
One knows that heaven is epiphenomenal,
Rising from peaked musicians with bad complexions.
Breakfast is good. An income is good.
It is good to be sunburnt, warm, and clean.
Besides this, what can you say with certainty?
In fact, what can you mean but this,
The sunlight where you are in turning time?
Who will rise up, speak out, convinced, convinced,
Affirm once more that nothing can be done
Without the help of that great Santa Claus
Promised to children in the middle ages
— Not now! But with cigar-store Indians
Remembered only in old vaudeville.
— I will speak out! I will show you a wonder,
The secret satisfaction of every wish!
Ladies and Gentlemen, I know you all,
I know you all, I know all that you want.
Which is, though vaguely, all. O you require
A big black piano
And skates for poise