What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little … - Delmore Schwartz

How the false truths of the years of youth have passed! Have passed at full speed like trains which never stopped There where I stood and waited, hardly aware, How little I knew, or which of them was the one To mount and ride to hope or where true hope arrives.

Its perorations verge upon the ceaseless orations of the ocean:
For reality's glow and glory, without poetry,
Fade, like the red operas of sunset,
The blue rivers and windows of morning.

O your life, your lonely life
What have you ever done with it,
And done with the great gift of consciousness?
What will you ever do before Death's knife
Provides the answer ultimate and appropriate?

As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,
Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feels the vast
Draft of the abyss sucking him down and down,
An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:

This is the way the night passes by, this
Is the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.