Berryman’s Sonnets (2 page)

*   *   *

My own first, delighted encounter with Berryman’s work was through his
77 Dream Songs
, which I carried around with me like a private hymnal when I was in college. At Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, where I spent an inordinate amount of time, the curator, Stratis Haviaras—this was in the 1970s—showed me two shoe boxes full of uncatalogued tapes of Berryman reading his poems aloud. I don’t remember the sources of the tapes. But I do remember offering to help sort them, and then spending many hours for many days at a tape machine, taking notes to figure out which poems he was reading, even noting where the spoken poems varied slightly from the ones in the books—
77 Dream Songs
,
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
, and
Berryman’s Sonnets
—I had open on the table before me. As anyone who has listened to Berryman knows, his voice is odd and seductive. The emphasis often falls peculiarly, on the “wrong” syllable. Sometimes he mumbles, sometimes he roars, and very often he pauses mysteriously. He chuckles at his own jokes and adopts “funny” vaudeville-style voices, hamming it up like all get-out. When his voice does not sound drunken—and even when it does—it carries a keening, musical quality that seems as if it should be accompanied by percussive strums on an Irish harp.

It was not difficult for me, at the age of twenty, to adore Berryman. Succeeding years, and the acquaintance of enough writers possessing that same lethal combination of arrogance and self-abasement, have made me less susceptible. Drunkenness, also, has lost its appeal. So the persona,
as
persona—and I hasten to add that I never knew the poet, and so am not speaking of the person, but only the public poet’s persona—is no longer present to charm me when I read the poems. Instead, newly, and as if for the first time, I am astonished and amazed by the poems themselves.

In reading the sonnets again, I find I can accept the persona—“Berryman” or Berryman, whichever—as flawed. Even in those sonnets where he coldly describes the pain he inflicts on others; or self-pityingly complains about his health; or boasts, while trying to seem nonchalant, that he owes Pound three letters. And the reason I can accept the flaws is because the poetry that conveys
all
this information, about suffering, and bragging, and adoring, and despising, and whining, and lusting, and howling at the moon, is so extraordinary that it seems to make an entirely new world of thought and feeling.

Of course everything new, in poetry, is grounded in the old. “Crumpling a syntax at a sudden need” (#47), Berryman reaches back in time, past Sidney’s forms to Thomas Wyatt’s syntax and meter, with its free, almost jazzy quality.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise,

Twenty times better, but once in special,

In thin array after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall

And she caught me in her arms long and small …

(
from “They flee from me…”)

Wyatt’s famous agonized lines of remembered bliss nearly resurrect themselves in Berryman’s sonnets:

I say
I laid siege—you enchanted me
. . [ … ]

I . . Only we little wished, or you to charm

Or I to make you shudder, you to wreck

Or I to hum you daring on my arm.
(#97)

In Wyatt’s sonnet “Some fowls there be,” he writes

For to withstand her look I am not able

And yet can I not hide me in no dark place,

Remembrance so followeth me of that face …

Since Wyatt, only Gerard Manley Hopkins and Berryman have been able to carry off a comparable sustained dis-ordering of syntax to successful effect. Berryman is most disordered when expressing himself in extremis, as did both Wyatt and Hopkins, in transports of agony or joy. The slicing-up of syntax seems for all three poets an authentic way to convey the disarrangement of the intellect in the face of powerful feeling.

Troubling are masks . . the faces of friends, my face

Met unawares and your face: where I mum

Your doubleganger writhes, wraiths are we come

To keep a festival, none but wraiths embrace [ … ] (#31)

The additional level of self-consciousness on which Berryman operates has everything to do with the self-consciousness of his century. One signal, in these sonnets, of self-consciousness is in the oddly adolescent way he cites the drinks, and sometimes the number of drinks, consumed. Here he describes his beloved—who loved music, he says, far more than poetry—in a moment of bliss:

[ … ] spare, Time, from what you spread

Her story,—tilting a frozen Daiquiri,

Blonde, barefoot, beautiful,

    flat on the bare floor rivetted to Bach. (#37)

And:

Listen, for poets are feigned to lie, and I

For you a liar am a thousand times,

Scars of these months blazon like a decree:

I would have you—a liner pulls the sky—

Trust when I mumble me. Than gin-&-limes

You are cooler, darling, O come back to me. (#43)

Returning again to the idea that the Italian sonnet form offers a kind of stalemate, or suspension of thought, rather than a conclusion: We can see why this form appealed to Berryman. He had seemingly resisted the very necessity of ending at all, adding poems 107 and 112–115, which explicitly round out or conclude the sequence, only later. These final sonnets, emotionally and syntactically calm by comparison with the rest, also seal his relationship with Sidney (“‘Look in thy heart and write!’”) in the final phrase: “I sat down & wrote.” This is ingenious because, like the sonnet form itself, it returns us to the beginning; we may have just read what he wrote, he tells us, but since
in the poem
he is sitting down to write, emotionally we are back where we started.

As we know, Berryman later invented his own form, the “dream song.” Looser than a sonnet, and also faster, it is a stripped-down and rebuilt sonnet, a serviceable three-stanza machine that can turn as often as it likes, and which neither structure nor rhyme can force to a conclusion. Dream songs are just over when they are over; they do not “end” or “conclude.” (I like to think of Berryman’s dream song form as “refusing” to conclude; as opposed to the Italian sonnet’s gentler “thwarted wishing” to conclude.) Refusing the end is characteristic of the poet’s late work. His poems become a kind of ongoing “diary,” in which the poet tries to outrun mortality, and all other endings, by the mad, brave exuberance of refusing to stop.

*
It is that 1967 edition of
Berryman’s Sonnets
we reprint here. A version called “Sonnets to Chris,” edited by Charles Thornbury and included in
John Berryman: Collected Poems, 1937–1971
, combined the 1940s manuscript versions (footnoting Berryman’s own subsequent edits of these) with the later poems.

Note

These Sonnets, which were written many years ago, have nothing to do, of course, with my long poem in progress,
The Dream Songs.
Sonnet 25 appeared in the fortieth-anniversary number of
Poetry;
the others are unprinted.

J. B.

Ballsbridge, Dublin

October 8th, 1966

H
E MADE, A THOUSAND YEARS AGO, A-MANY SONGS

FOR AN
E
XCELLENT LADY, WIF WHOM HE WAS IN WUV
,

SHALL NOW HE PUBLISH THEM
?

H
AS HE THE RIGHT, UPON THAT OLD YOUNG MAN
,

TO BARE HIS NERVOUS SYSTEM

&
DISPLAY ALL THE CLOUDS AGAIN AS THEY WERE ABOVE
?

A
S A FRIEND OF THE
C
OURT I WOULD SAY, LET THEM DIE
.

W
HAT DOES ANYTHING MATTER
? B
URN THEM UP
,

PUT THEM IN A BANK VAULT
.

I THOUGHT OF THAT AND WHEN I RETURNED TO THIS COUNTRY

I TOOK THEM OUT AGAIN
. T
HE ORIGINAL FAULT

WILL NOT BE UNDONE BY FIRE
.

T
HE ORIGINAL FAULT WAS WHETHER WICKEDNESS

WAS SOLUBLE IN ART
. H
ISTORY SAYS IT IS
,

J
ACQUES
M
ARITAIN SAYS IT IS
,

BARELY
. S
O FREE THEM TO THE WINDS THAT PLAY
,

LET BOYS
&
GIRLS WITH THESE OLD SONGS HAVE HOLIDAY

IF THEY FEEL LIKE IT
.

[ 1 ]

I wished, all the mild days of middle March

This special year, your blond good-nature might

(Lady) admit—kicking abruptly tight

With will and affection down your breast like starch—

Me to your story, in Spring, and stretch, and arch.

But who not flanks the wells of uncanny light

Sudden in bright sand towering? A bone sunned white.

Considering travellers bypass these and parch.

This came to less yes than an ice cream cone

Let stand . . though still my sense of it is brisk:

Blond silky cream, sweet cold, aches: a door shut.

Errors of order! Luck lies with the bone,

Who rushed (and rests) to meet your small mouth, risk

Your teeth irregular and passionate.

[ 2 ]

Your shining—where?—rays my wide room with gold;

Grey rooms all day, green streets I visited,

Blazed with you possible; other voices bred

Yours in my quick ear; when the rain was cold

Shiver it might make shoulders I behold

Sloping through kite-slipt hours, tingling. I said

A month since, ‘I will see that cloud-gold head,

Those eyes lighten, and go by’: then your thunder rolled.

Drowned all sound else, I come driven to learn

Fearful and happy, deafening rumours of

The complete conversations of the angels, now

As nude upon some warm lawn softly turn

Toward me the silences of your breasts . . My vow! . .

One knee unnerves the voyeur sky enough.

[ 3 ]

Who for those ages ever without some blood

Plumped for a rose and plucked it through its fence? . .

Till the canny florist, amorist of cents,

Unpawned the peppery apple, making it good

With boredom, back to its branch, as it seems he could,—

Vending the thornless rose. We think our rents

Paid, and we nod. O but ghosts crowd, dense,

Down in the dark shop bare stems with their Should

Not! Should Not sleepwalks where no clocks agree!

So I was not surprised, though I trembled, when

This morning groping your hand moaning your name

I heard distinctly drip . . somewhere . . and see

Coiled in our joys flicker a tongue again,

The fall of your hair a cascade of white flame.

[ 4 ]

Ah when you drift hover before you kiss

More my mouth yours now, lips grow more to mine

Teeth click, suddenly your tongue like a mulled wine

Slides fire,—I wonder what the point of life is.

Do, down this night when I adore you, Lise,

So I forsake the blest assistant shine

Of deep-laid maps I made for summits, swine-

enchanted lover, loafing in the abyss?

Loaf hardly, while my nerves dance, while the gale

Moans like your hair down here. But I lie still,

Strengthless and smiling under a maenad rule.

Whose limbs worked once, whose imagination’s grail

Many or some would nourish, must now I fill

My strength with desire, my cup with your tongue,

       no more Melpomene’s, but Erato’s fool? . .

[ 5 ]

The poet hunched, so, whom the worlds admire,

Rising as I came in; greeted me mildly,

Folded again, and our discourse was easy,

While he hid in his skin taut as a wire,

Considerate as grace, a candid pyre

Flaring some midday shore; he took more tea,

I lit his cigarette . . once I lit Yeats’ as he

Muttered before an Athenaeum fire

The day Dylan had tried to slow me drunk

Down to the great man’s club. But you laught just now

Letting me out, you bubbled ‘Liar’ and

Laught . . Well, but thén my breast was empty, monk

Of Yeatsian order: yesterday (truth now)

Flooding blurred Eliot’s words sometimes,

       face not your face, hair not you blonde but iron.

[ 6 ]

Rackman and victim grind: sounds all these weeks

Of seconds and hours and days not once are dumb,

And has your footfall really not come

Still? O interminable strength that leaks

All day away alert . . I am who seeks

As tautly now, whom the vague creakings strum

Jangled this instant, as when the monstrous hum

Your note began!—since when old silence spéaks.

Deep down this building do I sometimes hear

Below the sighs and flex of the travelling world

Pyromaniacal whispers? . .
Not to be

They say
would do us good . .
easy . . the mere

Lick and a promise of a sweet flame curled

Fast on its wooden love:
silence our plea.

[ 7 ]

I’ve found out why, that day, that suicide

From the Empire State falling on someone’s car

Troubled you so; and why we quarrelled. War,

Illness, an accident, I can see (you cried)

But not this: what a bastard, not spring wide! . .

I said a man, life in his teeth, could care

Not much just whom he spat it on . . and far

Beyond my laugh we argued either side.

‘One has a right not to be fallen on! . .’

(Our second meeting . . yellow you were wearing.)

Voices of our resistance and desire!

Did I divine then I must shortly run

Crazy with need to fall on you, despairing?

Did you bolt so, before it caught, our fire?