Athlete, virtuoso,
Training for happiness,
Bend arm and knee, and seek
The body's sharp distress,
For pain is pleasure's cost,
Denial is route
To speech before the millions
Or personal with the flute.
The ape and great Achilles,
Heavy with their fate,
Batter doors down, strike
Small children at the gate,
Driven by love to this,
As knock-kneed Hegel said,
To seek with a sword their peace,
That the child may be taken away
From the hurly-burly and fed.
Ladies and Gentlemen, said
The curious Socrates,
I have asked, What is this life
But a childermass,
As Abraham recognized,
A working with the knife
At animal, maid and stone
Until we have cut down
All but the soul alone:
Through hate we guard our love,
And its distinction's known.
(C) Delmore Schwartz
01/01/2000
Best Poems of Delmore Schwartz
- A Dream Of Whitman Paraphrased, Recognized And Made More Vivid By Renoir
- Prothalamion
- Poem (you, My Photographer, You, Most Aware)
- Saint, Revolutionist
- The Greatest Thing In North America
- The Journey Of A Poem Compared To All The Sad Variety Of Travel
- Philology Recapitulates Ontology, Poetry Is Ontology
- The Poet
- Out Of The Watercolored Window, When You Look
- This Is A Poem I Wrote At Night, Before The Dawn
- America, America!
- The Ballad Of The Children Of The Czar
- Albert Einstein To Archibald Macleish
- A Young Child And His Pregnant Mother
- For The One Who Would Not Take His Life In His Hands
- Faust In Old Age
- Far Rockaway
- Concerning The Synthetic Unity Of Apperception
- Baudelaire
- Archaic Bust Of Apollo
- Apollo Musagete, Poetry, And The Leader Of The Muses