The first line of each of the [two] preceding stanzas runs into the second; but “So it is and has been” [at the beginning of the third stanza abruptly comes to] a full stop. A resource of verse form makes the generalization possible. And after the four weak endings which precede it, the heavy regular final line of the stanza takes up the metrical accumulation and acts, again, as generalization, moving from the earth into mythology.
In the early 1940s, Berryman further experimented with the relationship between style and form in the terza rima (“A Poem for Bhain,” “The Lightning,” and “Canto Amor”). But in the title poem of The Dispossessed, written in early 1948 after Sonnets, he experimented with the form itself to accommodate the strain and torsion of his style. In a sense, Berryman dispossessed the terza rima rhyme scheme (aba, bcb, cdc, etc.) with his own (xaa, xbb, xcc, etc., ending with jxx j). His end-rhymes alternate between harmony and disharmony, the second and third lines being couplets, so that each stanza is preceded and followed by unrhymed lines. Several end-rhymes are paired unexpectedly, even ironically, as in “watch” and “crotch,” “wood” and “understood,” “bloomed” and “fumed.” And when harmony is suggested in the end-rhyme “dove / love,” each is described in unexpected—and undesirable—ways: The dove is “storm-worn” and love is a “spidery business.”
The model of composition Berryman desired, he noted while he was writing Sonnets to Chris in 1947, is like “Beethoven’s onslaughts on the very materials of music.” In Sonnets, all Petrarchan, he compounded the structural tension between the octave and sestet by creating an expectation of simple syntax and then violated the expectation with a more tangled syntax—what he described as “[c]rumpling a syntax at a sudden need” (Sonnet 47). On a draft of Sonnet 36, for example, he indicated his plan: “beg [in] & end simple, centre v[ery] elaborate, / elevated in diction & syntax.” The octave illustrates how his plan worked:
Keep your eyes open when you kiss: do: when
You kiss. All silly time else, close them to;
Unsleeping, I implore you (dear) pursue
In darkness me, as I do you again
Instantly we part . . only me both then
And when your fingers fall, let there be two
Only, ‘in that dream-kingdom’: I would have you
Me alone recognize your citizen.
Just as a single word marks a climax in “On the London Train,” so the phrase “You kiss” in line 2 marks an abrupt shift to his elaborate syntax in the next five lines. And, as in “On the London Train,” the conflict between syntax and verse form occurs in lines 4 and 5, “again / Instantly we part,” and in 6 and 7, “two / Only.” The split results in the “impression of strain, torsion … useful to the subject,” significantly the subject of parting.
Berryman’s method in Sonnet 36 reveals a new development in his ability to fuse disrupted syntax and strict form, a remarkable achievement since there are only two end-rhymes in the eight lines (abbaabba). His style now controls his form rather than the reverse. After the simple opening, he violates the reader’s expectation in the middle of the couplet of lines 2 and 3: “All silly time else, close them to; / Unsleeping, I implore you (dear) pursue.…” Where he had relied on form alone to signify his abrupt shifts and splits in “On the London Train,” his violations are now bolder, out in the open. His syntax at once complements and counterpoints his use of form.
In his early poems (before the invention of his Homage stanza in 1948), Berryman seemed to use form to sharpen the sense of chaos he frequently described. But his stanza forms might also be seen as a rebellion against their orderly design, as though something were to be gained rather than lost. What seems to be gained is the sense that order and stability are continuously threatened by chaos. His form allows him to have it both ways: he at once mimes chaos and holds it at bay. For example, the threat of the chaos characteristic of Anne Bradstreet’s pioneer environment is reflected in Berryman’s nervous form, and Bradstreet herself, as Berryman said, rebels against her environment, her barrenness, her marriage, and her “illness, loss, and age.” One might make a similar statement about the rebellious relationship between Henry and the alternating beats (5–5–3–5–5–3) of The Dream Songs stanza.
About four years after completing Sonnets, Berryman wrote almost the same planning note for Homage that he had written for Sonnet 36 (“beg. & end simple…” etc.). But now the alternations between simple and elevated styles—to be complemented and counterpointed by form—widen to new complexity in a much longer poem:
beg. & end simple, centre v[ery] elaborate,
elevated in diction & syntax
strong line, & strokes—tenuity—sensuous—bulks
of facts—wit—rich strangeness
Stately vs. rapid / light
(subdued) limpid & pathetic————full & superb!
Berryman said he modeled Homage on Yeats’s eight-line stanza in “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” but he rebelled against his master with the play of his own form. His stanza, Berryman wrote, “breaks not at midpoint [as Yeats’s does] but after the third short line.” He described his stanza as though the lines are alternations between harmony and dissonance, as though the form sets up boundaries around chaos and imitates (even sharpens) it. After the three-beat break at midpoint, he wrote, “[A] strange four-beat line leads to the balancing heroic couplet of lines five and six, after which seven is again short (three feet, like line three) and then the stanza widens into an alexandrine rhyming all the way back to [line] one.” The accentual pattern of the whole stanza, 5–5–3–4–5–5–3–6, is almost a graph of his abrupt shifts. Similarly, his rhyme schemes fluctuate; most are abxbccba and abxbccxa, but he frequently varies them, for example, abcbddca and axbcbbca.
The final stanza of Homage illustrates Berryman’s interplay of form and rhythm:
O all your ages at the mercy of my loves
together lie at once, forever or
so long as I happen.
In the rain of pain & departure, still
Love has no body and presides the sun,
and elfs from silence melody. I run.
Hover, utter, still,
a sourcing whom my lost candle like the firefly loves.
The three-beat third and seventh lines force a sharp turn in the regular rhythms of the lines that precede them, but each operates quite differently. The unrhymed and hovering “forever or” at the end of the second line at once pauses, runs over, and creates pressure on “so long as I happen,” and then a full stop. The balancing seventh three-beat line functions the opposite way. While it, too, because it is short, emphasizes, it also reverses the iambic rhythms of the two preceding lines and stutters in trochees and pauses in counterpoint to the final primarily iambic line. Appropriately, in Berryman’s notion of tension and strain that is useful to the subject, to “Hover, utter, still” is to plumb “a sourcing” like that of the relationship between the style and form (and rhyme) of Sonnets—“A flash of light, an insight” (Sonnet 66).
Berryman’s use of form after Homage continued to be scored by abrupt alternations, and The Dream Songs are orchestrated with an even grander power: “O formal & elaborate, I choose you,” Henry says, “but I love too the spare, the hit-or-miss…” (Dream Song 265). And yet, his Dream Song stanza sounds out the simple counterpoint of the Petrarchan sonnet he had reworked since 1934. Although The Dream Songs depicts, he said, “the kind of hysterical states that modern artists go in for,” they are “temperate and held in control, partly by form.” Berryman described the three-stanza form of The Dream Songs as an “extended three-part sonnet” (six lines per stanza), and, like Hegel’s unending triads of thesis-antithesis-synthesis (see Dream Song 78), the triadic alternations of the Dream Song stanzas continuously flex, shift, empty, and refill. Berryman’s stresses alternate in triads, 5–5–3–5–5–3 (similar to the alternating stresses of 5–5–3–4–5–5–3–6 in Homage), and each short three-beat line either closes down or pivots outward,
as the short line functions in Homage. His end-rhymes in The Dream Songs are hit-or-miss. The stanzas “use various rime schemes,” Berryman said in an interview before departing for Ireland to complete the Songs:
More and more I’m inclined not to use rime at all. But the notion is to preserve an impression of rime over the three stanzas but without any actual rime at all, even internal rime.… The effect is that of a simulation of rime as … an end structure, but you actually don’t have any.… [I]n my songs the rime business is incidental, and it depends on how things go.
The alternating stresses and rhymes of Berryman’s stanzas complement the larger design of The Dream Songs, for it is structured “according to Henry’s nature” in which “open & closed sings on his mystery / furl & unfurl” (Dream Song 260).
The design of Love & Fame “furls & unfurls,” as it were, according to Berryman’s nature. Each of the four parts sets up an expectation and then diminishes or destroys it: “[E]ach of the four movements,” Berryman wrote in the revised edition of Love & Fame, “criticiz[es] backward the preceding, until Part IV wipes out altogether all earlier presentations of the ‘love’ and ‘fame’ of the ironic title.” Similarly, his lines abruptly shift. It is as though Berryman returns to the creation of an irregular quatrain, as he had learned in 1934, in which a single line is abruptly shortened (usually the second or third line, but sometimes the first or fourth). The third line of the final stanza in the last of the “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” is a good example:
Make too me acceptable at the end of time
in my degree, which then Thou wilt award.
Cancer, senility, mania,
I pray I may be ready with my witness.
Like the concluding lines of Homage, the penultimate short line (at least in the number of words) is flanked by longer lines that are primarily iambic. The short line calls attention to itself and counterpoints, primarily in trochees, the regular rhythms of the flanking lines. The effect of the rhythms of the three lines together is to create a music that sounds out and brings into control the speaker’s terror of death.
In the end, the primitive rite is nearest Berryman’s view of how his forms work. His notes on his copy of his essay on Whitman’s Song of Myself offer a further gloss on how the stanzas of the sonnet may be remade into a rite. Referring to Whitman’s “I Saw in Louisiana a Live Oak Growing,” he wrote: “This [stanzaic form] modified the Petrarchan sonnet (5–5–3 instead of 4–4–6) into a more organic & explosive form for a primitive rite.” Similarly, The Dream Songs extends the sonnet form (three sestets) and modifies the lines, rather than the stanzas, to 5–5–3–5–5–3. Odd numbers, because they are unharmonious and dynamic (even numbers being harmonious and static), appealed to Berryman’s primitive seriousness. Even when he used the balanced eight-line (the early and middle period) and the four-line stanzas (the late period), the stanzas abruptly break and spin the reader around.
A passionate syntax. Just as Berryman was attracted to unpredictability in his forms, so was he drawn to a style that refuses to guarantee the reader’s expectations. He wrote to his mother in January 1937 that he hoped to emulate not only Henry Vaughan’s “display of power and controlled articulation in form” but also his “continual marvellous energy from line to line.” And the continual energy, he recognized, is a matter of style, as Yeats confirmed during Berryman’s first and only meeting with the master in London in the spring of 1937: “I never revise now,” Yeats said, “but in the interests of a more passionate syntax.”
“Passionate syntax” and “marvellous energy from line to line,” however, were the standards Berryman had determined for himself in his first extant poems for his mother’s birthday on July 8, 1934. The fourth sonnet (of four) addresses her as though she were the muse of his poems yet to be written, and it foreshadows his later notions about the lightning operations of disparate styles. The octave praises his mother’s wit and brilliant speech: “a facile word / Struck by the interplay of minds, admit[s] / A verbal brilliance, casual thought transferred.” Her abrupt turns of thought—which “as from a cage / Leaps out”—at once summon and counterpoint “poignant beauty to her page.” The sestet likewise summons and counterpoints its themes; it concludes that beauty is synonymous with “explosive power” and therefore the very qualities the poet desires in poetry:
The quality that strains behind the words
A poet employs to freeze the soul, nor lose
From a phrase the explosive power of bawling herds—
This tumbles through her lines—though mind refuse
An ordered rhyme—like the undertones of birds:
Fortunate, to weld prose to verse, nor choose!
The sonnet sets multiple counterpoints in motion: in form, the octave counterpoints the sestet; in expression, prose counterpoints poetry; in theme, the static words that “freeze the soul” counterpoint a syntactic energy that has “the explosive power of bawling herds.” The effect of his strain and torsion is not so much to suspend opposites in tension as it is, as Berryman said of Stephen Crane’s style some fifteen years later, to give the impression of “everywhere … a mind at stretch.”
The “interplay of minds,” the “casual thought transferred,” and the “explosive power of bawling herds” inform practically all Berryman’s subsequent descriptions of his style. In his 1940 “A Note on Poetry,” he compared the “cumbersome expansion” of a prose version of a poem with the “direct, concrete, compact” power of the poem itself: “In the process of translation [from poetry to prose] the particular irony and wit escaped; the abruptness of juxtaposition and the violence were lost.” During the intense six months of writing Sonnets to Chris, he discovered that prodding and disrupting syntax in a given form is a means by which he, like his mother’s “thought transferred,” may arrive at an insight:
I prod our English: cough me up a word,
Slip me an epithet will justify
My daring fondle, fumble of far fire
Crackling nearby, unreasonable as a surd,
A flash of light, an insight.…
(Sonnet 66)
Of his style in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet Berryman said, “I wanted … [a style] at once flexible and grave, intense and quiet, able to deal with matter both high and low.” And his planning notes for Homage recall his mother’s “thought, as from a cage / Leaps out”: “Stately vs. rapid / light / (subdued) limpid & pathetic———full & superb!” Likewise, the style of The Dream Songs “leaps out” with the explosive power of Henry’s thought: “The river of his wide mind broke the jam, / somebody called his wild wit riverine…” (Dream Song 182). Like Berryman’s mother’s wit (“the interplay of minds”), Henry’s interplay of musics resonates with “the slow movement of Schubert’s Sonata in A” (Dream Song 204) and the swift alternations of Scarlatti’s music that “spurts his wit across [Henry’s] brain” (Dream Song 258). In the last years of his life, Berryman came full circle (his youthful desire not to “lose / From a phrase the explosive power of bawling herds”) in his description of the merit of the opening poem of Love & Fame—“a certain explosive feeling, a certain administrative rhythm-set.”
The explosive feeling Berryman desired is accomplished in part by the counterpoint of repeated rhetorical forms and disrupted syntax. The outcome is a peculiarly serious and comic style that happily embraces “matter both high and low.” His Chaplinesque muse calls for “a sense of humour / fatal to bardic pretension” (“Images of Elspeth,” L&F).
Berryman described his early verse as having “no voice of my own” and written in the “‘period style,’ the Anglo-American style [Yeats and W. H. Auden] of the 1930’s.” Prophetic and rhetorical, his somber, public voice of disfigurement, grief, and despair may be illustrated in the opening stanza of “The Statue,” written in 1939:
The statue, tolerant through years of weather,
Spares the untidy Sunday throng its look,
Spares shopgirls knowledge of the fatal pallor
Under their evening colour,
Spares homosexuals, the crippled, the alone,
Extravagant perception of their failure;
Looks only, cynical, across them all
To the delightful Avenue and its lights.
Randall Jarrell might have had this poem in mind when he referred to Berryman’s early poems as “statues talking like a book.” There is a textbookish quality in the rhetorical device of repeating the verb at the beginning of the line—“Spares, Spares, Spares, Looks.” While the adjectival phrase (“tolerant through years of weather”) and the dislocated adjective (“cynical” in line 7) vary the drumming repetition, the rhetorical style not so much invites readers to listen as it commands them to take heed.
When Berryman experimented with rendering other voices in writing plays (most unfinished and all unpublished), the badgering rhetoric of his 1930s style was gradually modified in the 1940s to nervous and individual voices. This discovery of the dramatic mode freed him to write in his own idiom and to invite readers to observe, perhaps empathize with, the personalities his style creates. One of his earliest experiments in the creation of an individual voice was in writing a play during his Christmas break in Paris in late 1936. He wrote to his mother on December 26: “I’m going to keep it [the play] from being pseudo-Elizabethan; [I] want a nervous, mechanical accent, giving way only infrequently to full passion.” His weakness, he implies, was to sprint flat out from the opening line to the last, but, he realized, a play calls for “keeping the tempo down in order to get the power when it’s needed.”
Not until the late 1930s, in poems like “The Animal Trainer (1)” and “The Animal Trainer (2),” did the dramatic mode take hold in his poetry. Two voices—the Heart and the Animal Trainer (i.e., the Poet)—debate symbolically in public masks about the origins of poetry. But each poem does not come out of “a realizable situation,” as he had observed while he was writing his first play, and the dramatic mode had not yet influenced his rhetorical style. “The Nervous Songs,” most of which were written in 1942, mark the beginning of his change as his characters speak at moments of personal crisis in the “nervous, mechanical accent” he wanted in his first play. His style now begins to work with the power of both a realizable situation and a personal voice, as in “The Song of the Tortured Girl”:
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