it is hard to be friends with any Hamlet
Ophelia screams in the river
and his mates barely survive the ambit -
the girlfriend’s verse was better delivered
poetry’s a monster that has to be fed
an artificial intelligence
where memories and lives are shredded
and changed into a new relevance
we poets grow into the circle
of the Castle of Limbo - number
has abandoned us for miracles
greater than words to its penumbra
algorithms now blaspheme or bless
and as we perish our machines congress
Oxford
18 April 2018
Delmore Schwartz was a New York poet, writer and critic, who suffered from manic depression. This poem was composed on the night train from Birmingham to Oxford and as I went to sleep at home on 17 April and it was completed at sunrise. The Castle of Limbo is a feature of Dante’s “Inferno” canto IV.