#146

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The first of twelve (!) elegies to B.’s friend, the poet Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz’s reputation was growing until mental illness took over and he retreated from public view, growing paranoid, rejecting his friends and family, writing constantly but publishing little of his work. He died in 1966, alone, of a heart attack in a New York hotel, where had been holed up, writing furiously the whole time, but it took authorities three days to find someone to claim his body. So, a difficult ending, but who knows? Maybe the opportunity to write without expectations or an audience is liberating for someone infected with the need to free himself through bursts of language.

Early on, before mental illness took over, he was learned, philosophical and intense, and B. became good friends with him, meeting through the social and professional networking structures that high-placed literati call into being.

Toward the end of the poem, Henry declares, speaking of the dead, “’Down with them all!’” Their deaths were theirs, Henry waits for his own. “I have tried to be them, god knows I have tried, / but they are past it all, I have not done”. He’s holding himself up to the accomplishments of the great poets who have lived and worked, and he’s finding himself and his work wanting. It’s a lament of unattained glory fueled by ambition.

So, here’s a philosophical and political poem after the little of Delmore Schwartz I’ve read, but with no pretense of imitation, gratitude, nor elegy:

 

The Weight of Books, the White of Glory

The weight of books comforts, the obdurate

Fragrance of sewn paper a thermal blanket

Against the frost of our Confederate

Renaissance. Poe knew that fust 

And reported his findings: Red Deaths

In a black room, a stone mansion

Crumbling into its tarn. The breaths

Of slaves corroded the oaken boards

Of grand white houses, breaths which frighten

Like shades in revolt, so history urges

Again to make the cold grip tighten

Since those others have forgone 

Their rightful places. Book spines fade

In the light, their papers crumble.

To open and hotly take is to trade

A bleachèd glory. Mine eyes

Have seen. Mine eyes have weighed

The glory of the soulless lords,

Found them light and feeble, afraid

Of blanched mist and airy lies.

KZ