BOO KS
367
Summer knowledge is not the winter's truth, the truth of fall,
the autumn's fruition, vision and recognition:
It is not May knowledge, little and leafing and growing green,
blooming out and blossoming white,
It is not the knowing and the knowledge of the gold fall and the
ripened darkening vineyard,
Nor the black, tormented, drenched and rainy knowledge of
birth, April and travail,
The knowledge of the womb's convulsions, and the coiled cord's
ravelled artery, severed and cut open,
as the root forces its way up from the dark loam
...
Plainly, we are in another world, if not in another universe. The
fonnal subjects of these recent poems are mainly music, children,
summer and poetry (this last in a group of
centos,
or mosaics of
quotation, of Baudelaire, Sterne, Swift, H6lderlin, and, inevitably,
Shakespeare). But they are all, somehow, about spiritual growth
and the terrible toll it exacts from the human soil it springs from.
Throughout these poems, images of ripening fruit, quickening
animal life, dramatically active weather, fire and water extend
themselves. Again and again, the same image will be given a
slight turn and used anew: "the phoenix knowledge of the vine
and the grape near summer's end"; "The phoenix is the mean–
ing of the fruit, / Until the dream is knowledge and knowledge is
a dream"-indeed, the phoenix image seems to be central to all
the new poems. What dies here is the energy of the intellect, some–
how; what arises from its ashes is a vitality that we are to take
as being more general:
For, in a way, summer knowledge is not knowledge at all:
it is second nature, first nature fulfilled, a new birth and
a new death for rebirth, soaring and rising out of the flames
of turning October, burning November, the towering and
falling fires, growing more and more vivid and tall
In the consummation and the annihilation of the blaze of fall.
The poetry that built a burning bridge between Plato and Coney
Island seeks a redemption, in Mr. Schwartz's recent poetry, from
