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Delmore Schwartz - Father And Son
Work rating: Low

Father: 
On these occasions, the feelings surprise, 
Spontaneous as rain, and they compel 
Explicitness, embarrassed eyes—— 


Son: 
Father, you’re not Polonius, you’re reticent, 
But sure. I can already tell 
The unction and falsetto of the sentiment 
Which gratifies the facile mouth, but springs 
From no felt, had, and wholly known things. 


Father: 
You must let me tell you what you fear 
When you wake up from sleep, still drunk with sleep: 
You are afraid of time and its slow drip, 
Like melting ice, like smoke upon the air 
In February’s glittering sunny day. 
Your guilt is nameless, because its name is time, 
Because its name is death. But you can stop 
Time as it dribbles from you, drop by drop. 


Son: 
But I thought time was full of promises, 
Even as now, the emotion of going away—— 


Father: 
That is the first of all its menaces, 
The lure of a future different from today; 
All of us always are turning away 
To the cinema and Asia. All of us go 
To one indeterminate nothing. 


Son: 
Must it be so? 
I question the sentiment you give to me, 
As premature, not to be given, learned alone 
When experience shrinks upon the chilling bone. 
I would be sudden now and rash in joy, 
As if I lived forever, the future my toy. 
Time is a dancing fire at twenty-one, 
Singing and shouting and drinking to the sun, 
Powerful at the wheel of a motor-car, 
Not thinking of death which is foreign and far. 


Father: 
If time flowed from your will and were a feast 
I would be wrong to question your zest. 
But each age betrays the same weak shape. 
Each moment is dying. You will try to escape 
From melting time and your dissipating soul 
By hiding your head in a warm and dark hole. 
See the evasions which so many don, 
To flee the guilt of time they become one, 
That is, the one number among masses, 
The one anonymous in the audience, 
The one expressionless in the subway, 
In the subway evening among so many faces, 
The one who reads the daily newspaper, 
Separate from actor and act, a member 
Of public opinion, never involved. 
Integrated in the revery of a fine cigar, 
Fleeing to childhood at the symphony concert, 
Buying sleep at the drugstore, grandeur 
At the band concert, Hawaii 
On the screen, and everywhere a specious splendor: 
One, when he is sad, has something to eat, 
An ice cream soda, a toasted sandwich, 
Or has his teeth fixed, but can always retreat 
From the actual pain, and dream of the rich. 
This is what one does, what one becomes 
Because one is afraid to be alone, 
Each with his own death in the lonely room. 
But there is a stay. You can stop 
Time as it dribbles from you, drop by drop. 


Son: 
Now I am afraid. What is there to be known? 


Father: 
Guilt, guilt of time, nameless guilt. 
Grasp firmly your fear, thus grasping your self, 
Your actual will. Stand in mastery, 
Keeping time in you, its terrifying mystery. 
Face yourself, constantly go back 
To what you were, your own history. 
You are always in debt. Do not forget 
The dream postponed which would not quickly get 
Pleasure immediate as drink, but takes 
The travail of building, patience with means. 
See the wart on your face and on your friend’s face, 
On your friend’s face and indeed on your own face. 
The loveliest woman sweats, the animal stains 
The ideal which is with us like the sky ... 


Son: 
Because of that, some laugh, and others cry. 


Father: 
Do not look past and turn away your face. 
You cannot depart and take another name, 
Nor go to sleep with lies. Always the same, 
Always the same self from the ashes of sleep 
Returns with its memories, always, always, 
The phoenix with eight hundred thousand memories! 


Son: 
What must I do that is most difficult? 


Father: 
You must meet your death face to face, 
You must, like one in an old play, 
Decide, once for all, your heart’s place. 
Love, power, and fame stand on an absolute 
Under the formless night and the brilliant day, 
The searching violin, the piercing flute. 
Absolute! Venus and Caesar fade at that edge, 
Hanging from the fiftieth-story ledge, 
Or diminished in bed when the nurse presses 
Her sickening unguents and her cold compresses. 
When the news is certain, surpassing fear, 
You touch the wound, the priceless, the most dear. 
There in death’s shadow, you comprehend 
The irreducible wish, world without end. 


Son: 
I begin to understand the reason for evasion, 
I cannot partake of your difficult vision. 


Father: 
Begin to understand the first decision. 
Hamlet is the example; only dying 
Did he take up his manhood, the dead’s burden, 
Done with evasion, done with sighing, 
Done with revery. 
Decide that you are dying 
Because time is in you, ineluctable 
As shadow, named by no syllable. 
Act in that shadow, as if death were now: 
Your own self acts then, then you know. 


Son: 
My father has taught me to be serious. 


Father: 
Be guilty of yourself in the full looking-glass.
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