John Berryman

by John Berryman

  Berryman’s assurance in his new voice spurred him to begin Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. On March 22, 1948, the second day of spring, he wrote the first stanza and the first three lines of the second, “and there,” Berryman said later, “for almost five years, I stuck.” But it was actually his long “pause,” like his New Year’s resolve for 1937, before yet another beginning. He made notes periodically for several years, and during the first two months of the new year of 1953, he wrote fifty new stanzas: “I was on fire every second,” Berryman said, and the poem was completed on March 22. Like the opening poem of TD, Homage begins in winter, but then, abruptly, “[t]he winters close, Springs open.” “One proud tug greens Heaven,” and Bradstreet gives birth to her first child. Later, one of her children asks, “Mother, how long will I be dead?” She replies, “[N]ot we one instant die, only our dark does lighten.” The poem ends with the burial of Bradstreet, and the poet speaks of a departure and “a sourcing” in the final lines.

  And so one might continue with lengthy analyses of The Dream Songs (1969), Love & Fame (1971), and Delusions Etc. (1972), but a few examples will show further how fundamental the theme of formation and re-formation was throughout his poetry. While the rhythms of The Dream Songs ebb and flow, they may be more accurately characterized as a series of Henry’s departures and returns, his deaths and rebirths. Part I, for example, begins with Henry’s first simultaneous death and birth in being forced out of the secure world of the womb: “Then came a departure. / Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought” (Dream Song 1). Part I ends with a view of death as a fortunate event: “I had a most marvellous piece of luck. I died” (Dream Song 26); consequently, Part II begins: “good Spring / returns with a dance and a sigh” (Dream Song 27). The Dream Songs likewise ends with a new beginning (when Henry begins his songs he is in his mid- to late forties; now he is in his fifties). Song 380 prepares the way with Henry’s recovery in a hospital, a recovery that will be “a fresh version of living.” In Song 382 Henry is dead once again, and a strange and terrifying dancer comes to his bier and “dances Henry away.” But “all is well” in his dance with death, for his rebirth takes place and 383 begins: “It brightens with power, when dawn begins.” The Dream Songs appropriately ends with a celebration of death and renewal on Thanksgiving Day.

  Berryman’s last two collections, in their composition, design, and rendering of the personality, are clearly congruent with his own life. The poems of each collection were written between the beginning of the new year and into spring: Love & Fame in February and March 1970—“The Search” was written on the first day of spring—and most of Delusions Etc. between January and April 1971. The intensity of composition (Berryman described himself as being “hot as a pistol”) is a measure of his sense of immediacy and the degree to which he wished to free himself from alcohol and become another person.

  In Love & Fame, Berryman engages his past youthful self, this time not in the sliding pronouns of The Dream Songs but in his verbs, his confusion (or fusion?) of past and present tenses. Each of the four parts represents Berryman’s cyclical new beginnings from early youth to middle age (he was fifty-five at the time). In Part I, he accounts primarily for his freshman year at Columbia (1932–33); in Part II, he is in his first year at Cambridge (1936–37); in Part III, his life spreads out through time and space (significantly the section begins with “The Search”); and Part IV establishes another new beginning, his “initiatory faith” in God (late 1969 to early 1970).

  “Her & It,” the opening poem of Love & Fame, begins in the past tense (“I fell in love with a girl”) and then shifts to the present: “It’s not now near at all the end of winter.” As in the opening of The Dispossessed and Homage, winter establishes the theme of a seasonal death. The two concluding poems of Part I move swiftly from a “Crisis” to a “Recovery,” as the titles suggest. In “Crisis,” Berryman says he had been “squarely in the middle of Hell” and “more dead than alive.” But, he says in the next poem, “I pulled myself reluctantly together at last / & bowed goodbye…” (“Recovery”). As he boards his ship to England, he recalls that his “nervous system … sprang back into expectation.” Part II opens with his leaving the New World for the Old World of Cambridge University, and on board the ship his expectation of a new beginning continues (in the present tense): “I swamp with possibility” (“Away”). The section ends with a “Tea” with a young woman, a new love and a new beginning. The titles of Part III suggest that his formation and re-formation continue not only throughout his own life but also in the larger cycles of time. Part III begins with “The Search” and ends with a descent to death and an ascent toward new life, as the titles suggest, a sort of Dantesque descent and ascent: “The Hell Poem,” “Death Ballad,” “Purgatory,” “Heaven,” and “The Home Ballad.” Part IV, “Eleven Addresses to the Lord,” abruptly shifts to his present life. In the first address, Berryman establishes the “initiatory faith” as his new beginning. Several addresses later, he speaks of “transfiguration!” The addresses conclude with his identifying with the death of Germanicus, a Christian martyr, and he hopes that he, too, may embrace death with Germanicus’ courage: “Make too me acceptable at the end of time / in my degree, which then Thou wilt award.”

  In his last volume, there is more emphasis on the et cetera than on the delusions. Although the collection is not so clearly structured by the alternating rhythms of death and rebirth, each section ends with a celebration and affirmation. Part I, the Hours of the Office recounted in the “Opus Dei” poems, begins in winter and ends with the assurance that “the winter will end.” The Hours begin before sunrise and progress through dawn, noon, sunset, and midnight. Berryman further suggests in his headnote to “Opus Dei” that “the offices are not within one day said but thro’ their hours at intervals over many weeks—such being the World.” The images of rebirth frequently appear in De, as in “Beethoven Triumphant” (“Chary with his loins / womanward, [Beethoven] begot us an enigma”). Part III ends with the celebration of the birth of his daughter, and the volume closes with his article of faith in the person of Israel’s King David, who, despite his failures (“the wide hell in the world”), defies his adversities with a tragic gaiety: “yea, / all the black same I dance my blue head off!”

  Berryman’s adaptation of the rhythms of human life frequently turned to questions about the relationship between poetry and the poet. Is the individual life at the mercy of art? Or is art at the mercy of the individual life? At the time he completed Sonnets in 1947, Berryman wrote in his diary that he had believed “dogmatically for years” in “the perfect separateness of Life & Art, the poet’s life negligible & to-be-lost,” but, he resolved, “no more.” In his life thereafter, his poetry became “a terminal activity” (“terminal” suggesting both an ending and a juncture) that “aims … at the reformation of the poet.” It is true, as some critics have said, that his life was at the mercy of his art, but it is equally true that his art was at the mercy of the re-formations of his life.

  The sounds of change, the rhythms of poetry. When Berryman sent Wallace Stevens a copy of The Dispossessed in 1948, Stevens was courteously aware of Berryman’s most sensitive apprehension and hope: “Your poems seem to be packed full so that the very edges of the syllables matter,” Stevens wrote, “but I am going to take them slowly.” On the back of the letter Berryman commented: “If only a few readers would hear them slowly, I think the poems might hope for something.”

  “All we know is ears” (Dream Song 97), Henry says, and hearing is one of his—and Berryman’s—major themes. In one sense, we “play it by ear / out there until all’s straight” (Dream Song 278). In another, Berryman believed that his ear accounted for the craft of his art. When Berryman began writing, he felt that, like Henry, his poetry was “keen & viable,” but only in listening to the old masters did his art begin (Dream Song 166). In “Ivory,” one of his student poems (1935), the speaker suggests that although a poem may appear to be a Yeatsia
n sanctuary of peace and certainty—“There is no peace / Outside the song”—the speaker-poet believes so at the risk of ignoring a primitive listening to life:

  There is no peace

  Outside the song.

  So wrote the poet: while the drums

  Beat without: Remotely to his ears, years

  Rolled their long thunder.

  And when the young Berryman read a poem that was too polished or rhetorical, he wrote in an unpublished poem in 1937: “My ears by easy melody are made mad / And all my brain rings with this competence.” As he wrote or revised his poems in the late 1940s and early 1950s, his notes reflect a similar concern: “[C]an’t hear style,” or “where is my ear?” or, more significantly, “control the ear w[ith] mind & heart.” Predictably, Berryman judged other poets by the quality of their ear: “Milton is the supreme master of syntax,” Berryman said in his 1949 essay on Ezra Pound’s poetry; “behind this mastery lies his ear.” And on Pound: “I scarcely know what to say about Pound’s ear. Fifteen years of listening have not taught me that it is inferior to the ear of the author of Twelfth Night.” He heard not only the sounds of poetry; in Waller’s style of violating the reader’s expectation, he also heard “the sound of the change of a national mind.”

  Berryman asks readers to listen attentively to life, as he assumes the poet has, so that they may hear (and become part of) the sounds of the poet’s listening. The degree to which readers respond to the same, or kindred, rhythms might be one test of the poet’s effectiveness, but in the matter of reading poetry, Berryman emphasized that a fundamental part of the contract between readers and the poem is that they hear its sounds and rhythms: “People read with their eyes, not their ears.” “Poems should be read aloud,” Berryman advised, “until you get so that you can hear [them] with your eyes.”

  As a young man, Berryman set about hearing poems with his eyes. On how he came to hear Yeats’s “A Prayer for Old Age,” the twenty-two-year-old Berryman wrote to his mother: “Like most of his poems it should be read aloud a hundred times—sometimes only after weeks have I understood an intonation.” He also memorized a number of poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Swift, Blake, Wordsworth, Yeats, and Auden as well as those of his contemporaries Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, Bishop, and Lowell. In his classes and readings throughout his life, he recited them with brilliance and vibrancy.

  The singular rhythms Berryman heard in his experience are similar to his uncontrollable animals in “The Animal Trainer” and The Dream Songs: “Huddled from their recesses, the goblins spring,” Henry says, “while the sound goes roaring” (Dream Song 204). In his first ambitious long poem, “Ritual at Arlington” (unpublished), the speaker hears the terrible sounds of his violated past in the voices of the dead: “[L]isten! can you hear / Their tenuous invective, the bones’ compelled / Restraint in the ground?” The sounds of the “tenuous invective” of the dead reverberates throughout Berryman’s writing, and the terror the sounds call up never changes. He alternately hears “[p]yromaniacal whispers” (Sonnet 6) and “the little cough somewhere … a chime” (Dream Song 29). He is terrified by the “enormous sounds / downward … [that] up bring real” (Dream Song 120), and the “notes in the sullen ground” whose “solitude is great & dug to last” (Dream Song 268). These terrifying sounds seemed to confirm Berryman’s expectation of abandonment; he hears the sounds of his fears of the dead (especially his father) and his own dying. As a result, he renders a strange music: “My harpsichord weird as a koto drums / adagio for twilight … and the spidery business of love” (“The Dispossessed,” TD).

  If readers are baffled by Berryman’s strange and dissonant music, how may they learn to hear it? One short answer is that they might begin by recalling an assumption so simple that one easily forgets it: to hear (in all senses of “hearing”) Berryman’s poems, they must be read aloud. Michael Dennis Browne, a poet with a fine ear for the music of poetry, describes vividly how his baffled, English-trained ear first heard Berryman’s poetry:

  It wasn’t until I heard John Berryman himself read … that I began to feel the real power and energy of [The Dream Songs].… He read them slowly—more slowly at times than I would have thought possible—but there were also variations within this slowness, sudden bursts and accelerations, sudden drastic increases in volume. And the poems came over to the audience with an extraordinary combination of authority and intimacy—a kind of lyrical power that I had not heard in spoken poetry before.

  Readers may not have Browne’s advantage of actually hearing Berryman read (several recordings are available), but his description captures how Berryman’s power and energy may work. Baffled by 77 Dream Songs, a friend asked Kate Donahue (Berryman’s third wife) how to begin reading the Songs: “Just read the first one over and over and over,” she said, “until you hear it. Then read the others.” Berryman added: “Well, that’s good advice.”

  Berryman believed that sounds, in some mysterious way, replenish the deep springs of the soul. Like Balzac’s description of Sarrasine (“His soul passed into his ears.… He seemed to hear through every pore”), the poet’s listening—and by implication the reader’s—may be an actual, physical experience that empowers the soul. In his unfinished poem “Selbst,” written in August 1948, Berryman seemed certain of the marriage of the ear and the soul:

  Some bones, and old clothes, and remorse, two eyes

  None of the best, and if it has a soul

  The soul has ears.

  “[T]he sound of things,” Berryman wrote to a friend a month later, “is important to the soul—no reason, but they are; or the reason just in the movement of the blood, the recurrent flash of the lids that interrupt the world, the rhythms of destruction and rebuilding in the body minute by minute.” But Berryman was not satisfied with a metaphor of the soul’s mysterious listening, for the rhythms of poetry may be so accurate and so near the nature of experience that they are the reality. “The only permanent thing is rhythm,” he wrote in an unpublished “Manifesto,” “In a poem we hear rhythm as the pace of the soul.” What Berryman means by the soul he does not explain, but he seems to assume the traditional notion of the inner spiritual life. The life of the soul, he suggests, is sustained by the same alternating rhythms as those of the body. The poem, if the poet has the talent and the luck, at once portrays and enacts the pace of both body and soul.

  The power and control of form. Berryman began writing poetry at the age of nineteen in late June or early July 1934 with four Petrarchan sonnets (the earliest extant poems) for his mother’s birthday on July 8. The limitations of the sonnet must have appealed to him, but the counterpoint of the octave and the sestet tapped a personal energy, an apposition of opposing elements. He also experimented with violating strict rhyme. In November 1934, shortly after his twentieth birthday, he wrote with great excitement to E. M. Halliday that he was “experimenting with rime a good deal.” In two quatrains he had written, he said he intentionally used “two imperfect rimes” because “in so tight and monotonous a form as the 4–3–4–4 quatrain tends to be, four strong rimes seem to me too ‘set.’” He was also “working in the sonnet again” and searching out new ways to revitalize its traditional use.

  But Berryman’s ambition at the time was greater than his experience, and he continued to experiment with tightening and relaxing stanza forms. In his most ambitious poems throughout the late 1930s, he favored the Yeatsian, “meditative” stanza (eight lines), but a number of others are in seven-, six-, five-, four-, and three-line stanzas. In a poem like “The Trial” (1937), he experimented with terza rima (axa, bxb, etc. rounding to efe, gfg); in “World-Telegram” (1939) the number of lines in the successive stanzas diminish, alternate, and expand (6, 5, 4, 5, 4, 6, 7, 7); and in “The Animal Trainer” poems (1939 and 1940), the stanzas diminish from eight lines to a single line, in what he called a “sliding stanza” (8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1).

  Berryman experimented with sudden shifts in thought and feeling in his strict stanza forms.
In his introduction to “Twenty Poems” (1940) he explained how the break of the verse line in “On the London Train” (written in 1938) may both enact and correspond with the speaker’s thought and feeling, in this instance “the ordeal which above all others is humiliating, of loving without return.” In the first two stanzas, the speaker observes a man who appears to be lonely and imagines that an unspecified dozen women “fancy him beside a brook, / Their arms with his laced, / Holding him fast.” The man longs for one of the women to “take him into her house and care for his wounds.” In the third stanza, the speaker draws several conclusions from the imagined scene:

  So it is and has been . .

  Summon an old lover’s ghost,

  He’ll swear no man has lied

  Who spoke of the painful and most

  Embarrassing ordeal this side

  Satisfaction,—while the green

  Difficulties later are

  More than Zeus could bear.

  Berryman cited this stanza as an example of how irony, wit, “abruptness of juxtaposition,” and “violence” may be a consequence of verse form. The “first serious conflict between syntax and verse-form,” he wrote, occurs in lines 4 and 5—“‘most / Embarrassing’ and ‘this side / Satisfaction’ [which] are split in successive lines.” The result of this split is to create an “impression of strain, torsion … useful to the subject.” Berryman pointed out that in line 6 “‘Satisfaction’ is allowed to stand alone, as no other word in the poem does, because it represents a climax.” Conflict and alternation continue, however, in the split between lines 6 and 7—“green / Difficulties,” which “recalls, as it should recall for the subject, the ordeal which but seemed to end with ‘Satisfaction.’” Berryman cited two instances in this stanza where the pressure of verse form allows him to say more than in prose: