#3 ...what is the self amid this blaze?...

Today's poem is a little different than most of the others I'll post. While it contains my chief criteria for a good poem (rhyming lines, albeit only somewhat), it's distinctively modern and murky and I don't normally like poems like that. But there's a more personal connection to it.

I first came across it without realizing it was actually a poem. In the movie Star Trek Generations (for the nongeeks, the one where Captains Kirk and Picard meet), the film's villain quotes a line from the poem to Captain Picard:

"They say time is the fire in which we burn. Right now, Captain, my time is running out. We leave so many things unfinished in our lives. I know you understand."

I was entranced by that line, time is the fire in which we burn, but eventually forgot about it. I didn't see the movie again for many years, but when I did, that line jumped out at me again. This time, I googled it and discovered it was from a poem by Delmore Schwarz.

I won't lie. The poem doesn't make much sense to me. It's about a man walking through a park and remembering people he used to know. Beyond that, I'm lost. I'm sure it's deeply symbolic and meaningful and I'm Just Not Getting It, but....whatever. I can take my own meaning from it and that's enough for me.



Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day
by Delmore Schwartz



Calmly we walk through this April's day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(...that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn ...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(...that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.