Poem by Delmore Schwartz

Phoenix Lyrics

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.

1. In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave
2. In the Slight Ripple, the Mind Perceives the Heart
3. The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me
4. A Young Child and His Pregnant Mother
5. For the One Who Would Take Man's Life in His Hands

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