The Mounting Summer, Brilliant and Ominous / Delmore Schwartz

The Mounting Summer, Brilliant and Ominous

A yellow-headed, gold-hammered, sunflower-lanterned
Summer afternoon: after the sun soared and soared
All morning to the marble shining heights of marvellous blue,
Like lions insurgent, bursting out of a great zoo,
As if all vividness poured down, poured out, poured
Over, bursting and breaking in all the altitudes of blaze,
As when the whole ocean rises and rises in irresistable motion, shaking;
The roar of the heart in a shell or the roar of the sea beyond the 

  concessions of possession and the secessions of time's fearful procession, 

  precious even in continuous perishing.

~~
Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966)
from Summer Knowledge: New and selected poems, 1959

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Delmore Schwartz biography

Amin010n, Burning sunny day, 2020 (detail). CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Darkling Summer, Ominous Dusk, Rumorous Rain / Delmore Schwartz

Darkling Summer, Ominous Dusk, Rumorous Rain

1

A tattering of rain and then the reign
Of pour and pouring-down and down,
Where in the westward gathered the filming gown
Of grey and clouding weakness, and, in the mane
Of the light’s glory and the day’s splendor, gold and vain,
Vivid, more and more vivid, scarlet, lucid and more luminous,
Then came a splatter, a prattle, a blowing rain!
And soon the hour was musical and rumorous:
A softness of a dripping lipped the isolated houses,
A gaunt grey somber softness licked the glass of hours.

2

Again, after a catbird squeaked in the special silence,
And clouding vagueness fogged the windowpane
And gathered blackness and overcast, the mane
Of light’s story and light’s glory surrendered and ended
— A pebble — a ring — a ringing on the pane,
A blowing and a blowing in: tides of the blue and cold
Moods of the great blue bay, and slates of grey
Came down upon the land’s great sea, the body of this day
— Hardly an atom of silence amid the roar
Allowed the voice to form appeal — to call:
By kindled light we thought we saw the bronze of fall.

~~
Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966)
from Summer Knowledge: New and selected poems, 1959

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Delmore Schwartz biography

"Darkling Summer" read by Delmore Schwartz. Courtesy The French Gal Chronicles.

Calmly We Walk through This April's Day / Delmore Schwartz

Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day 

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn ...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn ...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(... that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
                                     No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;

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.

~~
Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966)
from In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, 1938

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Delmore Schwartz biography

"Calmly We Walk through This April Day" read by AllegedSuccess.