Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Strangers

By Delmore Schwartz 1913–1966 Delmore Schwartz

Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers.

Let Freud and Wordsworth discuss the child,

Angels and Platonists shall judge the dog,

The running dog, who paused, distending nostrils,

Then barked and wailed; the boy who pinched his sister,

The little girl who sang the song from Twelfth Night,

As if she understood the wind and rain,

The dog who moaned, hearing the violins in concert.

—O I am sad when I see dogs or children!

For they are strangers, they are Shakespearean.

Tell us, Freud, can it be that lovely children

Have merely ugly dreams of natural functions?

And you, too, Wordsworth, are children truly

Clouded with glory, learned in dark Nature?

The dog in humble inquiry along the ground,

The child who credits dreams and fears the dark,

Know more and less than you: they know full well

Nor dream nor childhood answer questions well:

You too are strangers, children are Shakespearean.

Regard the child, regard the animal,

Welcome strangers, but study daily things,

Knowing that heaven and hell surround us,

But this, this which we say before we’re sorry,

This which we live behind our unseen faces,

Is neither dream, nor childhood, neither

Myth, nor landscape, final, nor finished,

For we are incomplete and know no future,

And we are howling or dancing out our souls

In beating syllables before the curtain:

We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.

Delmore Schwartz, “Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Strangers” from Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge. Copyright © 1967 by Delmore Schwartz. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, www.wwnorton.com/nd/welcome.htm.

Source: Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1967)

Biography

Delmore Schwartz had, writes Alfred Kazin, "a feeling for literary honor, for the highest standards, that one can only call noble—he loved the nobility of example presented by the greatest writers of our century, and he wanted in this sense to be noble himself, a light unto the less talented.... So he suffered, unceasingly, because he had often to disappoint himself—because the world turned steadily more irrational and . . .

Continue reading this biography