Summer Knowledge, Delmore Schwartz

summerknowledge.txt

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:
The agony of the first knowledge of pain is worse than death,
    or worse than the thought of death:
No poppy, no preparation, no initiation, no illusion, only
    the beginning, so distant from all knowledge
    and all conclusion, all indecision and all illusion.
Summer knowledge is green knowledge, country knowledge,
    the knowledge of growing and the supply recognition
    of the fullness and the fatness and the roundness of ripeness.
It is bird knowledge and the knowing that trees possess when
The sap ascends to the leaf and the flower and the fruit,
Which the root never sees and the root believes in the darkness
    and the ignorance of winter knowledge
—The knowledge of the fruit is not the knowledge possessed
    by the root in its indomitable darkness of ambition
Which is the condition of belief beyond conception of
    experience or the gratification of fruition.
Summer knowledge is not picture knowledge, nor is it the
    knowledge of lore and learning.
It is not the knowledge known from the mountain's height, it
    is not the garden's view of the distant mountains of hidden fountans;
It is not the still vision in a gold frame, it is not the
    measured and treasured sentences of sentiments;
It is cat knowledge, deer knowledge, the knowledge of the
    full-grown foliage, of the snowy blossom and the rounding fruit.
It is the phoenix knowledge of the wine and grap near
    summer's end, when the grape swells and the apple reddens:
It is the knowledge of the ripening apple when it moves to the
    fullness of the time of falling to rottenness and death.
For summer knowledge is the knowledge of death as birth,
Of death as the soil of all abounding flowering flaring rebirth.
it is the knowledge of the truth of love and the truth of growing:
    it is the knowledge before and after knowledge:
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.