Delmore Schwartz

Here you will find the Poem The Choir And Music Of Solitude And Silence of poet Delmore Schwartz

The Choir And Music Of Solitude And Silence

Silence is a great blue bell
Swinging and ringing, tinkling and singing, 
In measure's pleasure, and in the supple symmetry
 of the soaring of the immense intense wings
 glinting against
All the blue radiance above us and within us, hidden
Save for the stars sparking, distant and unheard in their
 singing.
And this is the first meaning of the famous saying,
The stars sang. They are the white birds of silence 
And the meaning of the difficult famous saying that the
 sons and daughters of morning sang,
Meant and means that they were and they are the children
 of God and morning,
Delighting in the lights of becoming and the houses of
 being,
Taking pleasure in measure and excess, in listening as in
 seeing.

Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage.
Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of
 love.

So that when the great blue bell of silence is stilled and
 stopped or broken
By the babel and chaos of desire unrequited, irritated and
 frustrated,
When the heart has opened and when the heart has spoken
Not of the purity and symmetry of gratification, but action
 of insatiable distraction's dissatisfaction,

Then the heart says, in all its blindness and faltering 
 emptiness:
There is no God. Because I am hope. And hope must be 
 fed.
And then the great blue bell of silence is deafened, dumbed,
 and has become the tomb of the living dead.