In the Green Morning, Now, Once More

By Delmore Schwartz 1913–1966 Delmore Schwartz

In the green morning, before

Love was destiny,

The sun was king,

And God was famous.

The merry, the musical,

The jolly, the magical,

The feast, the feast of feasts, the festival

Suddenly ended

As the sky descended

But there was only the feeling,

In all the dark falling,

Of fragrance and of freshness, of birth and beginning.

Delmore Schwartz, “In the Green Morning, Now, Once More” from Summer Knowledge: Selected Poems (1938-1958). Copyright © 1959 by Delmore Schwartz. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: Summer Knowledge: Selected Poems (1938-1958) (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