Gustav Klimt, Tannenwald, 1901. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, public area.
Right this moment we’re publishing a beforehand unpublished poem by the poet, critic, and editor Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz was hailed as a promising quick story author and poet within the era that included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman; a longtime editor on the Partisan Assessment, he was the youngest individual ever to win the Bollingen Prize in 1959. (A few of Schwartz’s poems and letters had been revealed within the Assessment within the eighties and nineties.) The poem under was found with out a date, however is straight away recognizable for its recasting of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Night” from an alcoholic’s perspective. This riff is made poignant by the truth that Schwartz’s later years had been characterised by psychological sickness and alcoholism. He died, largely remoted, on the Chelsea Lodge in 1966.
Whose booze that is, I must assume I do know.
I purchased it a number of weeks in the past.
It stands there stolid on the shelf
Making me really feel decrease than low
Reminding me how I’m low,
Making me consider Crane and Poe.
My fatlipped mouth should assume it queer
To cease with out a single beer,
To cease with out a single beer
The deadest day I ever spent
In boredom and in self-contempt,
Sober, bitter, discontent.
My fingers have begun to shake,
My nerves assume there’s some mistake.
The one different thought I believe.
Is how I didn’t be a rake,
A narrative which ought to take the cake.
The booze stares at me like a brink.
However I have to await 5, I believe.
Lengthy hours should cross, earlier than I drink;
Lengthy hours and sluggish, earlier than I drink.
The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz shall be revealed by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April.
