Secrets Hidden In Rhyme

HIS TOY, HIS DREAM, HIS REST, by John Berryman; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $6.50. All sections quoted are copyright by John Berryman. Dream Song 172 appears through the courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

"RICH CRITICAL Prose"--like Berryman, I, too, dislike it. But this once I am writing because John Berryman, that mad and beloved poet, that heroic neurotic and bearded inventor of terminal diseases, has written an hilarious, pathetic, beautiful book: His Toy, His Dream, His Rest.

The book contains 308 poems, divided into four sections, and these complete a work called "The Dream Songs." The first three sections are in 77 Dream Songs, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965. The 385 poems are all in one form: three stanzas of six lines each, often rhyming, and occasionally with extra lines. The form is Berryman's own, and he uses it well, making each poem a sort of three-part sonnet.

Nearly all the poems deal with a character named Henry, who is described as anarchic, lustful, huffy, exasperated, wicked, powerful, shy, obsessed, mad, weak, and many other things. Mr. Berryman says that Henry is "not the poet, not me," but we can safely assume that Henry is a projection of Berryman. Indeed one of the major forces behind the Dream Songs is the tension between Henry (Berryman) as subject, poet, public man, and lonely soul. Henry appears as "I," "he," and "you," sometimes he comes in black-face, and once as a sheep.

Berryman uses English with great imagination and flair. There are supposed to be two schools of American poetry: one that is effluent like Whitman and Ginsberg, and one that is precise and economical, like Frost or Lowell. Berryman is a member of both groups, being both extravagant and craftsman-like. One has the feeling that each poem was once much larger, and that he has somehow squeezed it all up. His words expand to take in more and more, and then collapse together, so that when one reads them, they explode in the mind, like the little pills that become animals when one drops them in water. Berryman makes his words work double and triple time, using puns and irony as no one else can. Often the reader is at a total loss--Berryman tries to say so much that his shorthand is sometimes legible only to himself, if at all. It reminds one of Finnegans Wake. What can one make, for instance, of "an egg lined with fur" (272)?

His use of syntax, too, goes beyond even Henry James and Virginia Woolf. He twists and doubles back so much, one often has to parse his verse to make it come out, and even then it doesn't always work.

THE SONGS deal with an astonishing number of subjects. He talks about travel, old age, slavery, politics, poetry readings, Harvard, fame, broken arms, Charles Whitman, Christmas, alcohol, and adultery. Henry's world "is a solemn place, with room for tennis." (175) His major preoccupations are sex:

poor Henry/ for whom ... too much was never enough. (351)

The body is having its day (344)

and God:

Perhaps God is a slob ...

Our only resource is bleak denial (238)

and God has many other surprises (168)

and love:

Cling to me & I promise you'll drown too,

this voyage is terminal ... (355)

I gave my love a cookie ... (322)

Love me love me love me love me

I am in need thereof, I mean of love ... (192).

There is a constant concern for other poets. He writes of Frost, Jarrell, Williams, and dozens of others. The book is a catalogue of poets, alive and dead, forming the greatest lament since Dunbar.

DREAM SONG NUMBER 172

Your face broods from my table, Suicide.

Your force came on like a torrent toward the end

of agony and wrath.

You were christened in the beginning Sylvia Plath

and changed that name for Mrs Hughes and bred

and went on around the bend

till the oven seemed the proper place for you.

I brood upon your face, the geography of grief,

hooded, till I allow

again your resignation from us now

though the screams of orphaned children fix me

anew.

Your torment here was brief,

long falls your exit all repeatingly,

a poor exemplum, one more suicide

to stack upon the others

till stricken Henry with his sisters & brothers

suddenly gone pauses to wonder why he

alone breasts the wronging tide.

This poem was chosen because it deals with Berryman's preoccupations with poetry and survival, although it lacks his characteristic humor.

The finest of these poems about poets are the elegies for Delmore Schwartz, "Ten Songs, one solid block of agony," (157) which are among the finest elegies in the language:

... flame may his glory in that other place,

for he was fond of fame, devoted to it,

and every first-rate soul

has sacrifices which it puts in play,

I hope he's sitting with his peers: sit, sit,

& recover & be whole. (157)

Henry often thinks of death ("... may a niche be found/ in nothingness" 239) and of endurance:

What can be piled on Henry Henry can take (202)

O much, so much to be done (329)

All right, I'll stay (179).

He talks of going to pieces again and again:

... he went to pieces.

The pieces sat up & wrote. (311)

and always he is

perplexed whether to shout or moan

over man's riddling fate. (290)

In short, Henry is constantly in distress, the same kind of immense and trivial distress that afflicts everyone. The poems ring true because, although many of the subtleties may be lost, the essential confusion of modern men is there.

IT IS difficult to talk about the arrangement of the poems. The ordering of the 385 is no doubt important, but I do not understand its logic. The books seem to be arranged by the time and place they were written. Book VII was written during Berryman's stay in Ireland; Book VI is a leave-taking of America, and it starts with the leave-taking of a friend -- the ten elegies on Delmore Schwartz; Book V seems to center on a stay in the hospital; Book IV is mysteriously entitled "Opus Posthumous." Each book ends on an upbeat:

ancient fires for eyes, his head full

& his heart full, he's making ready to move on. (III)

[something: Charles Whitman or Fate]

... in the summer dawn

left Henry to live on. (VI)

... let's go on toward the sea. (VI)

but other than that I cannot see the pattern. It may be something like a movie, with each poem representing a frame that catches one particular mood or incident, but the movie is without a plot. Henry's life has no clear climaxes and denouments. Each instant is equal. "The Dream Songs" starts and ends in the middle of Henry's life. It goes nowhere and proves nothing, but that Henry is Henry and is still alive. The pattern, if there is one, may not be evident even to Berryman, and certainly not to Henry. Berryman says "its ultimate structure ... [is] according to his [Henry's] nature" (293), but that is not much help to the reader.

The one shift I did notice between the opening of "The Dream Songs" and the end is a greater awareness of immediate circumstance. The Songs become progressively less like dreams and more like "reality," and one of the results is that the later books are more easily understood. If you think I am shirking my critic's responsibility to make the book clear, let me assure you I am: there is a great deal about this book I cannot follow.

WHAT IS CLEAR is that Berryman is "tense with love" (279), though "truly isolated, pal," (203). He has wrestled out of himself a "yes" to the world and his own soul, and in the meantime he has created a delightful, profound, and moving poem. What Berryman means to say escapes him, as it must. Like all poets he longs for something he will never find, something he cannot even see. That something fills him with "nostalgia for things unknown" (211), but he knows it is beyond him.

But I am talking of the poet as he sees himself; the reader sees something different. Picture a seagull unhappy, hungry for a clam. He flies in perfect beauty, a perfect grace visible to all eyes but his own. John Berryman, however difficult his own muddle may be, exhibits to us a true grace of craftsmanship and earnestness.

Near the end his black companion asks him, "Is you going?", to which he responds.

--Oh, I suffer from a strike

& a strike & three balls: I stand up for much,

Wordsworth & that sort of thing.

The pitcher dreamed. He threw a hazy curve,

I took it in my stride & out I struck,

Ionesome Henry.

These Songs are not meant to be understood, you

understand.

They are only meant to terrify & comfort.

Lilac was found in his hand. (366)