Another uncomplicated, and
seemingly (to me) unpoetic report on the death of Delmore Schwartz. It’s a sad
story, truly, alone, ill, mentally unstable, and B. was obviously devastated by
the whole thing, enough to write twelve poems about it. But rather than
participate in the grief over his demise, which spoke quite clearly to the poet
who might just have been worrying about a similar end, let’s be honest, we’ll
instead celebrate Schwartz’s work with another look at one of his poems. They’ve
been quite interesting so far. We’ll see what comes of it.
“In the Green Morning, Now, Once
More”
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/238114
Do we not all have a childhood
memory, or a few, that embodies “The merry, the musical, / The jolly, the
magical, / The feast, the feast of feasts, the festival”? Here’s one of mine:
It was 1968, on the very last day of 4th grade. It was a Field Day
celebration. We spent the day outside, playing games, or free to roam around
the school grounds doing what we pleased. I was sitting somewhere, alone for
the moment, enjoying the perfect early summer weather, and actually thinking to
myself that the weather was so perfect and pleasant, and the tone of the
school, the teachers and my classmates, and my
mood such, that I would always remember this day. And it turns out I have. A
second grade girl sat next to me and we talked for a long time, I don’t remember
what about. I just remember her yellow-blond hair, how pretty she was, and
being content that with all swing sets, ball games and tag games, the quaint
carnival attractions the teachers and older kids had set up, the ice cream and
lemonade, that she was most content to sit with me on a concrete parking curb
and chat about whatever was on her mind. That’s all. I felt too old at 9 to
properly have a crush on a girl of 7, so that stayed under wraps. But it was otherwise
exactly right and I remember it. An elegant and happy summer day, fresh and
hopeful. The summer that followed was a great one, though with no girls
involved whatsoever. Horses, caves, barns, cornfields, cows, bicycles,
treehouses, creeks, ponds and fishing, butterflies, abandoned buildings to
explore—heaven. Maybe the memory of that day keeps shining because the hope in
summer it portended came to such ripe fruition.
Like with everyone, I guess, the
sky descended too, eventually. Cares, bullying, failures, growth and awkward
change, sadness and loss, shame, unrequited love and unfulfilled desires, the
familiar distressing litany of growing up. The conventional take, exactly as with
the poem yesterday, is that as we grow and the sky descends, we leave the
freshness of a perfect Field Day behind forever. Schwartz doesn’t see it that way:
The perfect days follow and grow with us. And you know what, Berryman? If you
lose sight of that, it’s because you’re not looking. Maybe something, booze or
an enduring distress, have made you blind and stopped you cold. For all their
maniacal energy, there is a torpor evident in The Dream Songs too. Schwartz has a poem titled “Baudelaire,” which
I read and didn’t choose here, because I’m not in an inviting mood at the
moment for laziness, lack of motion, and the damnation that follows. And
Charles Baudelaire, whose great book is titled Lest Fleurs du Mal (The
Flowers of Evil), is all about exactly that. My good friend, Fr. John, told
me not long ago that sin is lack of movement. Maybe I’ll look at “Baudelaire”
tomorrow. Schwartz here claims that there is only the feeling, in the
midst of all the dark falling, of freshness. It’s not as positive a statement
as I would like: only the feeling can
be read as less than the full presence of fragrance, freshness, birth and
beginning; it’s a feeling, but in the end you only get birthed once. But I’m
not fully convinced, either in my experience of life or my reading of the poem.
You get rebirthed all the time! It's there in the title: Once more. Pay attention!
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