I mentioned before that my first introduction to Berryman was Dream Song #14. It remains one of my favorite poems ever written, and knocks around in my brain the way “You do not do, you do not do / Anymore black shoe” and I grow old…I grow old…/ I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled have taken up permanent residence there. Some poems you love, but some poems set up house. There are a number of Dream Songs that live in the back of my brain, namely, numbers 1, 4, 14, 29 and 76.

One of the reasons I like The Dream Songs so much is because Henry is such an outsider. When it comes to academia, he’s an insider who feels like an outsider. When it comes to life, there is always that feeling that Henry is on the outside looking in. As a generally shy, usually awkward person, as a person who has/had a love/hate relationship with academia, I can relate on a, um, decidedly less depressing level.

In the first Dream Song, we are introduced to this theme early on: “All the world like a woolen lover / once did seem on Henry’s side. / Then came a departure.” Thus the loneliness of the Dream Songs begins. Henry’s one friend to talk to is putting on a minstrel show; that is to say, even his friend is not who he says he is, and furthermore, acts more of a comedian to Henry’s straight man. This friend has no name, no face, and is performing in a show, of which it is not clear that Henry is aware he’s part.

So much of The Dream Songs is just, well, heartbreaking. Soul crushing. Devastating.

29
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

(This is the poem, by the way, that I compared to “Smell of Blood” back when we were discussing Nuala.) This is the Saddest Poem Ever Written. I can’t read it without crying, the way I can’t watch Audrey Hepburn throw Cat out of the cab into the rain without crying. (Okay, to be honest, #29 just makes me sad and a little teary-eyed, but the wet cat turns me into a blubbering idiot. Yeah. I’m highbrow.) There is such a loneliness here. The poem echoes like solitary confinement, brooding over the punishments he feels he deserves for a crime he never committed. The last line, “Nobody is ever missing,” feels only partially true. Because what is missing is some sort of connection between Henry and the people around him. The imagined crime seems to be some sort of rationalization for his loneliness. He deserves to be alone because he feels he has done something terrible. As with #4 when Henry says, “There ought to be a law against Henry,” his friend replies, “There is.” There is a deep shame that surfaces throughout the Dream Songs. It is, as in #29, excruciating at times.

You know what it is–and this just occurred to me–I like grand gestures in poetry.* I like wildly dramatic statements, big bold metaphors, bold use of rhythm or repetition. The poems I quoted in the first paragraph? Big, ambitious poems. Poems that use heavy repetition, intense rhythm, and metaphors that threaten to knock you silly. Big, bullying metaphors. Poems that can hardly keep their heads above water what with the big heavy grandiosity sitting on their shoulders. I guess I’m not big on the subtlety. And there’s little that’s subtle about Berryman. Henry’s a sad, sad man. And he’s fucked up and fighting and lusting and complaining. He’s a mess. He slaps his metaphors around so fast that the grammar doesn’t even land right. And goddamn, but I love him for it.

I’m not sure I’ve even completed a thought yet, but to quote Ani, “I’ve got shit to do” and American Idol to watch.

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*This train of thought brought to you by Denis Johnson, whose poem “Enough” collected in <em>Incognito Lounge</em>, begins with the lines, “The terminal flopped out / around us like a dirty hanky…” While I admit that the simile makes very little sense, I’ve always admired it, and appreciate Johnson for the spectacular…balls…with which he writes. (I’d been toying with the idea of choosing this book next, but still somewhat undecided….)

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