Dream Song 1. The beginning of Henry.
I'm hoping to do a good impression of his beard, but I haven't had much luck. I read that he
might have been drunk here; he was a drinker; I have a great fondness for him. You wouldn't think he believed in God, somehow; he was very much into theology, and very much modest in terms of rating himself; he had to go through many deaths of friends who were also writers, and chose to take it upon himself to mourn them all: Faulkner, Hemingway, Yeats, Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Plath, Roethke and so on. Lycett, in his biography of Dylan, compares him to Dylan, saying only that Berryman's main difference was that he was terribly depressed, in addition to the womanizing, drinking and so on.
He said that Henry wasn't him, but you'd expect him to say that: only an attention-seeking, amateur would have said that he was him. He's not him, of course, but he is very much him in character: it's transposing, is it not. That's why he's pried open for all the world to see - but so are all writers who to choose to write and publish, they need not create an alter ego like Berryman did: if you write, you're exposed. Of course, the exposition might be substantial to the reader, and he gleams much, but someone like Berryman wanted a lot in return: he was extremely ambitious, he wanted to be up there with Whitman, and that didn't happen, and so, I guess at the end of a lot of cycles of trying, coupled with all his personal woes & problems, threw himself off the bridge: the poetic, though not necessarily true, justification being:
I failed to become a great poet.That last stanza is very interesting actually. I read somewhere that it can be divided into three voices, and I don't think the analysis is wrong:
What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
This is the narrator that has been speaking throughout the poem; subjective, intimate to the world of the protagonist Henry.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
This is Henry himself, if I remember correctly; very simple, but as you said, very sweet and true to life's pleasurable seconds that become decades in our dismayed experience of life.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.
This is another narrator, more objective; more god-sounding, don't you think? It has an austere, ascetic tang, but it's all very powerful: it shows us the power that Berryman could have created in his poems, had he chosen, or his own individuality allowed him, to construct such a voice.
He makes for awkward reading; he mixes the ugly/trivial & the beautiful/sublime & the ugly/sublime & the beautiful/trivial all together, in unequal proportion.
Another one of my favourites is Dream Song 14:
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
He begins reading it at around 4.20. Similarly awkward, if fascinating, reading like the one I posted it before.
I'd say his poetry's best quality are its pauses: they're not pauses of silent reflection. It's another kind of reflection, one that jars and moves in a disturbing manner; like an eel in a fish-tank.
http://pshares.blogspot.com/2007/11/homage-to-mistress-bradstreet-by-john.htmlThis is a long narrative poem by him; it's the poem that made him 'famous'.
Conversation and Pie
