Phoenix Lyrics in  General   

I

If nature is life, nature is death:
It is winter as it is spring:
Confusion is variety, variety
And confusion in everything
Make experience the true conclusion
Of all desire and opulence,
All satisfaction and poverty.

II

When a hundred years had passed nature seemed to man
a clock
Another century sank away and nature seemed a jungle
in a rock
And now that nature has become a ticking and hidden
bomb how we must mock
Newton, Democritus, the Deity
The heart's ingenuity and the mind's infinite
uncontrollable
insatiable curiosity.

III

Purple black cloud at sunset: it is late August
and the light begins to look cold, and as we look,
listen and look, we hear the first drums of autumn.

By Delmore Schwartz

Tell Your Friends About It | Print This Poem

Comments

You should be logged in to be able to leave comments

Other poems by Delmore Schwartz:

• A Dream Of Whitman Paraphrased, Recognized And Mad
• A Young Child And His Pregnant Mother
• Albert Einstein To Archibald Macleish
• America, America!
• Apollo Musagete, Poetry, And The Leader Of The Mus
• Archaic Bust Of Apollo
• At This Moment Of Time
• By Circumstances Fed
• Cambridge, Spring 1937
• Concerning The Synthetic Unity Of Apperception
• Far Rockaway
• Faust In Old Age
• For The One Who Would Not Take His Life In His Han
• From The Graveyard By The Sea
• From: A King Of Kings, A King Among The Kings
• In The Slight Ripple, The Mind Perceives The Heart
• Late Autumn In Venice
• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
• News Of The Gold World Of May
• O Love, Sweet Animal
• Occasional Poems
• Out Of The Watercolored Window, When You Look
• Parlez-Vous Francais?
• Philology Recapitulates Ontology, Poetry Is Ontolo
• Phoenix Lyrics
• Poem (Faithful to your commands, o consciousness)
• Poem (In the morning, when it was raining)
• Poem (Old man in the crystal morning after snow)
• Poem (Remember midsummer: the fragrance of box)
• Poem (You, my photographer, you, most aware)
• Prothalamion
• Saint, Revolutionist
• Socrates Ghost Must Haunt Me Now
• Someone Is Harshly Coughing As Before
• Sonnet On Famous And Familiar Sonnets And Experien
• Sonnet Suggested By Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, E
• Sonnet: O City, City
• Sonnet: The Ghosts Of James And Peirce In Harvard
• Spiders
• The Ballad Of The Children Of The Czar
• The Ballet Of The Fifth Year
• The Beautiful American Word, Sure
• The First Night Of Fall And Falling Rain
• The Journey Of A Poem Compared To All The Sad Vari
• The Poet
• The Sin Of Hamlet
• The Spring
• Tired And Unhappy, You Think Of Houses
• To Helen
• What Curious Dresses All Men Wear
• What Is To Be Given
• Yeats Died Saturday In France