Delmore Schwartz Poems

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Poem Faithful to your commands, o consciousness, o

Beating wings, I studied

the roses and the muses of reality,

the deceptions and the deceptive elation of the redness of the growing morning,

and all the greened and thomed variety of the vines of error, which begin by promising

Everything and more than everything, and then suddenly,

At the height of noon seem to rise to the peak or dune-like moon of no return

So that everything is or seems to have become nothing, or of no genuine importance:

And it is not that the departure of hope or its sleep has made it inconceivable

That anything should be or should have been important:

It is the belief that hope itself was not, from the beginning,
before believing, the most important of all beliefs.

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