John Berryman, "Dream Song 14"

Dream Song 14 by John Berryman : The Poetry Foundation

I haven’t had much luck with John Berryman and haven't tried him for a long time, but the literary community takes him very seriously. So I went to the trusty Poetry Foundation to find a thing or two by and about him. I’ve seen “Dream Song #14” a few times—maybe it’s one of Berryman’s most famous in the series. 

Angst? Boredom? Nirvana? 

Poetry Foundation says John Berryman's Dream Songs “portray [the speaker] ‘Henry’ [as] an anguished and often-deranged character very much like Berryman.”

Also,

 The Dream Songs display an astonishing variety of poetic resources that include slangy diction and a nervous, fractured syntax. Influenced by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, psychoanalysis and Berryman’s beloved Shakespeare, they also stirred controversy by drawing on nineteenth century minstrel shows in which white performers in blackface enacted racist stereotypes.

The frankness of Berryman’s work influenced his friend Robert Lowell and other Confessional poets like Anne Sexton. The poet’s lifelong struggles with             alcoholism and depression ended in 1972, when he jumped off a Minneapolis             bridge in the dead of winter.

Angst? Boredom? Nirvana?

I don’t find enough to love in the poem. At the risk of sounding insensitive toward clinical depression, it seems a self-indulgent whine with no specific causes for the speaker’s angst (if “angst” is not too ennobling a word for the boredom that ails him).

Also, I wonder about Line 3 with “Peoples bore me,” instead of “people.”  Is that another self-indulgent Look-at-Me-Me-Me-so-different-so-different? Or is Berryman trying to introduce an ethnic or cultural peoples-of-the-world theme? If so, he leaves it completely undeveloped.

I do like “the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, / we ourselves flash and yearn.” Those verbs make me wonder if all earthly motion and effort amount to, can be reduced to, flashing and yearning. I cannot dismiss the possibility.

The last line engages me, too. The speaker, Henry, wants to go away with the dog, presumably because the animal is more interesting than humans. Many of us might see it that way, but the poem leaves it an undeveloped and unconvincing proposition.

I don't know these guys, but I like the attitude

Finally, there’s the appealing play on “wag.” The most obvious meaning to most of us is probably the dog’s tail wagging and the speaker’s missing that happy activity. But that flies in the face of the structure and punctuation. Forgive me, but the grammar, the syntax, and the comma matter. I see two possibilities. First, the speaker might be urging himself to wag like the dog's tail. Secondly, "wag" might be a noun in apposition to "me" in which case the speaker is calling himself a “wag,” somebody who’s witty or jocular and gossipy.

What does either possibility do to or for the poem? Turn the whole thing into a joke on the reader?  “Don’t take me seriously—I’m just being a wag.” Or, "I'm terribly bored, and I'm telling myself to wag like a dog's tail. That would fix everything."

Mackinaw Bridge, 5 Miles Long, Connecting Michigan's Upper and Lower Peninsulas

Even if you find the closure an effective, or at least interesting, choice of words, can it carry and conclude the poem? Or does it shrink the poem to a writer’s effort to mess, perhaps cleverly, with his reader?

These aren't rhetorical questions; I'm really interested in others' takes on the poem and the closure in particular. And if someone out there has Berryman titles that would make me want to explore more of his work, please let me know. 

Dream Song 14 by John Berryman : The Poetry Foundation

NOVEMBER 27, 2009. Hawthorne's America, Artists and Intellectuals, Part Two

"My Kinsman, Major Molineaux":
Bumpkin Robin Discovers the Complexities of Town Life.









Or is this the village to which Ethan Brand returns?


PART TWO

So, as the artist makes self-centered, enlightening, courageous, impulsive, self-centered, self-destructive, egocentric, narcissistic decisions, the artist’s family and friends may have paid terrible prices—not always, I'm sure, but often. William Carlos Williams was a practicing physician, Wallace Stevens was a lawyer with an insurance company, and I’ve often wondered whether friends and relatives found them good human company, more stable—and altruistic?—than the “school” of Berryman, Plath, Hemingway, and a host of others. Banking didn’t seem to help Eliot much in his personal life. Maybe I'm grossly over-valuing what it means to look normal, hold down a steady job, to be in fact a professional. Am I the first?

Also, the same family, friends and social conventions may have been a cage, may have provided inane constraints and may have inflicted psychic wounds that half-created the young artist and sent him on his quest as much as his instincts and talent did. He might have been running from mundane demands or family pathology as much as he was running toward artistic expression and a defensible perspective on the world.

All of this is mostly likely a huge chicken and egg question. I’d be shocked to discover anything less than dozens of books on the subject, and maybe one day I’ll read some. What would I google? "Psycho Writer"? "The Dysfunctional Family and the Artist"?

For sparking all this, should Paula gets Comment of the Month, or does it just clinch the fact that Banjo has logorrhea? That’s a false apology. What I actually don’t understand is how so many people find questions like these boring, irrelevant, nerdy, especially when no one expects definitive answers—and especially compared to more manly, more exciting, mainstream problems like curing that slice at the Golden Parachute Golf Club, where the starboard rough is a genuine quagmire.

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