Delmore Schwartz citations (11 citations)

“Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.”

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Delmore Schwartz

"Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day" ( full text online http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/calmly-we-walk-through-this-april-s-day/); this poem has also been printed under the title "For Rhoda"
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)
Contexte: 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.

“Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.”

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Delmore Schwartz

"Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day" ( full text online http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/calmly-we-walk-through-this-april-s-day/); this poem has also been printed under the title "For Rhoda"
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)
Contexte: 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.

“Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love.”

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Delmore Schwartz

Source: Last and Lost Poems

“I no more wrote than read that book which is
The self I am, half hidden as it is
From one and all who see within a kiss
The lounging formless blackness of an abyss. How could I think the brief years were enough
To prove the reality of endless love?”

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Delmore Schwartz

"I am a Book I neither Wrote nor Read"
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)

“How the false truths of the years of youth have passed!
Have passed at full speed like trains which never stopped
There where I stood and waited, hardly aware,
How little I knew, or which of them was the one
To mount and ride to hope or where true hope arrives.”

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Delmore Schwartz

"I am a Book I neither Wrote nor Read" http://www.pbs.org/hollywoodpresents/collectedstories/writing/write_ds_poetry.html
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.”

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Delmore Schwartz

"The Ballad of the Children of the Czar" http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-ballad-of-the-children-of-the-czar/
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)

“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.”

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Delmore Schwartz

"Sonnet: O City, City" http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sonnet-o-city-city/
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)

“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.”

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Delmore Schwartz

"The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me" http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-heavy-bear-who-goes-with-me/
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)

“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.”

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Delmore Schwartz

"In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave" http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/in-the-naked-bed-in-plato-s-cave/
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)

“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.”

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Delmore Schwartz

"Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Strangers" http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/print.html?id=171346
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)

“Where the light is, and each thing clear,
Separate from all others, standing in its place,
I drink the time and touch whatever's near, And hope for day when the whole world has that face:
For what assures her present every year?
In dark accidents the mind's sufficient grace.”

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Delmore Schwartz

"The Beautiful American Word, Sure" http://www.pbs.org/hollywoodpresents/collectedstories/writing/write_ds_poetry.html
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)