To Delmore Schwartz

We couldn't even keep the furnace lit! Even when we had disconnected it, the antiquated refrigerator gurgled mustard gas through your mustard-yellow house, and spoiled our long maneuvered visit from T.S. Eliot's brother, Henry Ware... Your stuffed duck craned toward Harvard from my trunk: its bill was a black whistle, and its brow was high and thinner than a baby's thumb; its webs were tough as toenails on its bough. It was your first kill: you had rushed it home, pickled in a tin wastebasket of rum– it looked through us, as if it'd died dead drunk. You must have propped its eyelids with a nail, and yet it lived with us and met our stare, Rabelaisian, lubricious, drugged. And there, perched on my trunk and typing-table, it cooled our universal Angst a moment, Delmore. We drank and eyed the chicken-hearted shadows of the world. Underseas fellows, nobly mad, we talked away our friends. "Let Joyce and Freud the Masters of Joy, be our guests here," you said. The room was filled with cigarette smoke circling the paranoid, inert gaze of Coleridge, back from Malta – his eyes lost in flesh, lips baked and black. Your tiger kitten, Oranges, cartwheeled for joy in a ball of snarls. You said: "We poets in our youth begin in sadness; thereof in the end come despondency and madness; Stalin has had two cerebral hemorrhages!" The Charles River was turning silver. In the ebb light of morning, we stuck the duck's web-foot, like a candle, in a quart of gin we'd killed.

memory art & creativity narrative poem dreamlike

To Delmore Schwartz - meaning Summary

Youthful Brilliance and Despair

The poem recalls a chaotic night with Delmore Schwartz in a shabby house, where broken appliances, a preserved duck, alcohol, smoke, and literary talk create an atmosphere of comic despair. Lowell presents the young poets as intensely ambitious but isolated, turning to Joyce, Freud, and romantic images of madness while avoiding ordinary human ties. The dawn ending leaves their companionship suspended between intimacy, self-destruction, and literary fantasy.

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