That’s from the New York Times obituary for Maxine Kumin, who died last month. And here you’ve got – at least from where I’m sitting – your basic glorious early spring evening, the sun casting a green glance back at the deer paths in the garden, and the look couldn’t be less elegaic. But give it to a poet – give an evening like this to a great poet – and there’s likely to be elegy at the core.

Babette Deutsch said Delmore Schwartz was “haunted by the noise time makes,” and time makes quite a rumpus in transitional seasons.

Perhaps no poet of his period so skillfully depicted the threat of change in humankind and what he termed “the wound of consciousness.”

So here, in “Calmly We Walk Through this April’s Day,” he strides through the present – a spring present – tormented by the future. Outwardly calm with his lover along the streets of New York City —

Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away…

— he could almost be Frank O’Hara, except for that “fugitive,” a word, early in the poem, suggesting a world of time “running away” from him even as he tries to capture it. The year, he reminds himself, is 1937, and this is a poem of numbers – how long people lived before they died; how long it’s been since people died. So there’s a fine bumping springlike world out there and he’s walking in it, but his mind, his wounded consciousness, is altogether elsewhere, in being-toward-death. His parentheses alone at first carry the morbidity, the thoughts that torment him. Gradually, though, these thoughts escape the brackets and spill out onto the April street:

(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.)

My early naive schooling had me a theodicist, finding a transcendence that eluded the blaze in which time burns the self. Now when I look at children I see them as heedlessly brief, entirely engrossed in play even as time’s flame heightens around them.

His final stanza:

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.

He can’t believe it; he can’t understand it… It’s so bizarre that he has to perish, and that every voluptuous New York City April moment is really a tutorial in believing it. The more intensely life flashes, the more intensely that flash shows itself to be the fire in which we burn. So he ends with a faint prayer that as long as he subsists he may do so with a restorative memory at least able to retain the reality of his having been, his having had a past.

So much the same sort of language appears in poems that describe, like Schwartz’s, moments of intense beauty, of emotional intensity, shared between two people. In Louis MacNeice’s The Sunlight on the Garden, things don’t flame; they freeze. The sunlight fails.

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Same elegy at the heart of intensest being; same intrusion of despair into joy. MacNeice is more stoical, more tight-lipped, than Schwartz, but it’s the same being-toward-death he’s sharing with his companion. We cannot stop the mortal process.

The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

Ted Hughes’s September teases us at the beginning with a passionate love that maybe does suspend time and the awful reckoning with fire or ice.

We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
When kisses are repeated and the arms hold
There is no telling where time is.

It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
Time is nowhere.

In our own heedless bliss, the dark comes on “slowly,” and indeed “there is no telling where time is.” Infinity lies within us: behind the eye a star / under the silk of the wrist a sea. Time is nowhere. Great!

But now the long embrace is over; they stand up.

We stand; leaves have not timed the summer.
No clock now needs
Tell we have only what we remember:
Minutes uproaring with our heads

Like an unfortunate King’s and his Queen’s
When the senseless mob rules;
And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.

Pretty ugly, that. Not just some abstract flame or frost, but a double beheading, a vicious wiping out of what’s going on in their excited skulls right now. They are making memories, and they know it; each minute kissing and embracing and watching the slow dark is a minute retained in memory… This/that marvelous evening… Remember that marvelous evening? It’s the same memory for which Schwartz prays at the end of his poem. It’s all we have.

Nature of course couldn’t care less – the trees will quietly, efficiently, as they have forever, cast off these two.