F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Princeton poetry

• The Staying Up All Night
• The warm fire.
• The comfortable chairs.
• The merry companions.
• The stroke of twelve.
• The wild suggestion.
• The good sports.
• The man who hasn’t slept for weeks.
• The people who have done it before.
• The long anecdotes.
• The best looking girl yawns.
• The forced raillery.
• The stroke of one.
• The best looking girl goes to bed.
• The stroke of two.
• The empty pantry.
• The lack of firewood.
• The second best looking girl goes to bed.
• The weather-beaten ones who don’t.
• The stroke of four.
• The dozing off.
• The amateur ‘life of the party.’ 

• We Leave Tonight
• We leave to-night . . . 
• Silent, we filled the still, deserted street, 
• A column of dim gray, 
• And ghosts rose startled at the muffled beat 
• Along the moonless way; 
• The shadowy shipyards echoed to the feet 
• That turned from night and day. 

• And so we linger on the windless decks, 
• See on the spectre shore 
• Shades of a thousand days, poor gray-ribbed wrecks . . . 
• Oh, shall we then deplore 
• Those futile years! 

• See how the sea is white! 
• The clouds have broken and the heavens burn 
• To hollow highways, paved with gravelled light 
• The churning of the waves about the stern 
• Rises to one voluminous nocturne, 
• . . . We leave to-night.

• Princeton: The Last Day
• The last light wanes and drifts across the land, 
• The low, long land, the sunny land of spires. 
• The ghosts of evening tune again their lyres 
• And wander singing, in a plaintive band 
• Down the long corridors of trees. Pale fires 
• Echo the night from tower top to tower. 
• Oh sleep that dreams and dream that never tires, 
• Press from the petals of the lotus-flower 
• Something of this to keep, the essence of an hour! 

• No more to wait the twilight of the moon 
• In this sequestrated vale of star and spire; 
• For one, eternal morning of desire 
• Passes to time and earthy afternoon. 
• Here, Heracletus, did you build of fire 
• And changing stuffs your prophecy far hurled 
• Down the dead years; this midnight I aspire 
• To see, mirrored among the embers, curled 
• In flame, the splendor and the sadness of the world.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), an American novelist and short story writer, was the unofficial artistic spokesman for the Jazz Age (1920s-1930s). His fiction is filled with the excess and exaggerated exuberance that defined this era—although his own style, crafted with precision and discipline, and edged with a tragic tone, served as a perfect counterpoint to (and thereby transcended) the age about which he wrote. A victim of the these same excesses, however, he died of complications of “the bottle.” His early death precluded any firm estimation of his full potential as a writer; nonetheless, the work he did accomplish (especially The Great Gatsby (1925)) earned him a place among the great modern American novelists, including Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Like Faulkner’s verse, many of his poems (written during his days as a Princeton student), served as a training ground for his prose, and like Hemingway’s verse, it was occasional but often pointed up the thematic concerns he also explored in his fiction.