(After Rilke)
The city floats no longer like a bait
To hook the nimble darting summer days.
The glazed and brittle palaces pulsate and radiate
And glitter. Summer's garden sways,
A heap of marionettes hanging down and dangled,
Leaves tired, torn, turned upside down and strangled:
Until from forest depths, from bony leafless trees
A will wakens: the admiral, lolling long at ease,
Has been commanded, overnight-suddenly-:
In the first dawn, all galleys put to sea!
Waking then in autumn chill, amid the harbor medley,
The fragrance of pitch, pennants aloft, the butt
Of oars, all sails unfurled, the fleet
Awaits the great wind, radiant and deadly.
(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