That inescapable animal walks with me, Has followed me since the black womb held, Moves where I move, distorting my gesture, A caricature, a swollen … - Delmore Schwartz

When I was a young man, I loved to write poems
And I called a spade a spade
And the only only thing that made me sing
Was to lift the masks at the masquerade.
I took them off my own face,
I took them off others too
And the only only wrong in all my song
Was the view that I knew what was true.

Now I am older and tireder too
And the tasks with the masks are quite trying.
I’d gladly gladly stop if I only only knew
A better way to keep from lying,
And not get nervous and blue
When I said something quite untrue:
I looked all around and all over
To find something else to do:
I tried to be less romantic
I tried to be less starry-eyed too:
But I only got mixed up and frantic
Forgetting what was false and what was true.

But tonight I am going to the masked ball,
Because it has occurred to me
That the masks are more true than the faces: — Perhaps this too is poetry?
I no longer yearn to be naïve and stern
And masked balls fascinate me:
Now that I know that most falsehoods are true
Perhaps I can join the charade?
This is, at any rate, my new and true view:
Let live and believe, I say.
The only only thing is to believe in everything:
It’s more fun and safer that way!

"Darkling Summer, Ominous Dusk, Rumorous Rain"

A tattering of rain and then the reign
Of pour and pouring-down and down,
Where in the westward gathered the filming gown
Of grey and clouding weakness, and, in the mane
Of the light’s glory and the day’s splendor, gold and vain,
Vivid, more and more vivid, scarlet, lucid and more luminous,
Then came a splatter, a prattle, a blowing rain!
And soon the hour was musical and rumorous:
A softness of a dripping lipped the isolated houses,
A gaunt grey somber softness licked the glass of hours.

2

Again, after a catbird squeaked in the special silence,
And clouding vagueness fogged the windowpane
And gathered blackness and overcast, the mane
Of light’s story and light’s glory surrendered and ended — A pebble — a ring — a ringing on the pane,
A blowing and a blowing in: tides of the blue and cold
Moods of the great blue bay, and slates of grey
Came down upon the land’s great sea, the body of this day — Hardly an atom of silence amid the roar
Allowed the voice to form appeal — to call:
By kindled light we thought we saw the bronze of fall.

Whence, if ever, shall come the actuality
Of a voice speaking the mind's knowing,
The sunlight bright on the green windowshade,
And the self articulate, affectionate, and flowing,
Ease, warmth, light, the utter showing,
When in the white bed all things are made.