Delmore Schwartz

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• Each minute bursts in the burning room,
  The great globe reels in the solar fire,
  Spinning the trivial and unique away.
  (How all things flash! How all things flare!)
  What am I now that I was then?
  May memory restore again and again
  The smallest color of the smallest day:
  Time is the school in which we learn,
  Time is the fire in which we burn.
  • "Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day" in In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938); this poem has also been printed under the title "For Rhoda" Full text online

Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)

• I am my father's father,
  You are your children's guilt.
  
  In history's pity and terror
  The child is Aeneas again;
  
  Troy is in the nursery,
  The rocking horse is on fire.
  
  Child labor! The child must carry
  His fathers on his back.
  • "The Ballad of the Children of the Czar"

• A car coughed, starting. Morning softly
  Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair
  From underseas, kindled the looking-glass,
  Distinguished the dresser and the white wall.
  The bird called tentatively, whistled, called,
  Bubbled and whistled, so! Perplexed, still wet
  With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so,
  O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail
  Of early morning, the mystery of the beginning
  Again and again,
  while history is unforgiven.
  • "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave"

• Whence, if ever, shall come the actuality
  Of a voice speaking the mind's knowing,
  The sunlight bright on the green windowshade,
  And the self articulate, affectionate, and flowing,
  Ease, warmth, light, the utter showing,
  When in the white bed all things are made.
  • "Sonnet: O City, City"

• But this, this which we say before we’re sorry,
  This which we live behind our unseen faces,
  Is neither dream, nor childhood, neither
  Myth, nor landscape, final, nor finished,
  For we are incomplete and know no future,
  And we are howling or dancing out our souls
  In beating syllables before the curtain:
  We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.
  • "Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Strangers"

• That inescapable animal walks with me,
  Has followed me since the black womb held,
  Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
  A caricature, a swollen shadow,
  A stupid clown of the spirit's motive,
  Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
  The secret life of belly and bone.
  • "The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me"