(After Valery)
O Sea! … 'Tis I, risen from death once more
To hear the waves' harmonious roar
And see the galleys, sharp, in dawn's great awe
Raised from the dark by the rising and gold oar.
My fickle hands sufficed to summon kings
Their salt beards amused my fingers, deft and pure.
I wept. They sang of triumphs now obscure:
And the first abyss flooded the hull as if with falling wings.
I hear the profound horns and trumpets of war
Matching the rhythm, swinging of the flying oars:
The galleys' chant enchains the foam of sound;
And the gods, exalted at the heroic prow,
E'en though the spit of spray insults each smiling brow,
Beckon to me, with arms indulgent, frozen, sculptured,
and dead long long ago.
(C) Delmore Schwartz
01/01/2000
Best Poems of Delmore Schwartz
- A Dream Of Whitman Paraphrased, Recognized And Made More Vivid By Renoir
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- Poem (you, My Photographer, You, Most Aware)
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- 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
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- 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