Sisyphus2.0008

Sisyphus2.0008_Schwartz

"The Maxims of Sisyphus" by Delmore Schwartz
(Sisyphus' Success)
... How could I perceive how often success was won after
many repeated Sisyphean failures
(when I often had been drunken with the romance
and fortune of spontaneity, when ofteh the more
the effort, the worse the denial or outcome or ...

Schwartz conjures up for us a Sisyphus who has overcome the labor and has now become analytical about his gains. Like some guru of positive mental attitude, the Sisyphus is able to look back on his repeated failures and analyze how he learned the hard way that "the piddling puddling persistent will is the perpetual way." Perhaps there is irony in the way the poem's final stanza fades into a complex, incomplete sentence which itself is blending into some self-help claptrap: "... When all that I most wanted was near as my hands / and feet, and had been, ever ..."

Indeed, Homer's observation does not assert why Sisphyus pushes that boulder upward, merely that he does so again and again. This poem does not answer the why Sisyphus was put into the labor either. Schwartz does, though, answer what Sisyphus has gained from the repeated toil.