Green: Thoreau, the Turtle, David Wagoner

        

In looking for information about Thoreau and turtles (what? that doesn’t interest you?), I came across the site of Dr. Sandra Harbert Petrulionis:

http://thoreau.eserver.org/maddogs.html

She writes:

As some of you have doubtless noticed in your own reading of the Journal, in the mid-to-late 1850s Thoreau becomes . . .  obsessed with turtles. Robert Khun McGregor has characterized these scenes as 'small dramas of survival' where Thoreau attempts 'to find the meaning in a mud turtle’s lunch' (2). In 1854, Thoreau’s turtle endeavors include paternally watching over a nest of eggs that he’s stumbled on; struggling to lift the unobliging and unwieldy creatures into his boat; and sleeping with a large turtle shell in his bedroom — an event that occasions pure delight. Recalling in the morning that the shell lies near him, Thoreau exclaims, 'That the first object you see on awakening should be an empty mud-turtle’s shell!! Will it not make me of the earth earthy? or does it not indicate that I am of the earth earthy?' (Journal 8 300).

Should we ask ourselves to be of the earth earthy? If we do not sleep with turtle shells to feel earthy, what shall we do instead?

I’m not the only one who finds the subject appealing. Here is David Wagoner’s poem,  “Thoreau and the Mud Turtle” from Michigan Quarterly Review.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0046.224;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg

The poem is a bit prosy for my tastes—it feels like raw content more than honed poetry, but that raw content is pretty compelling. Based on the scant evidence above, what would you say about Thoreau's mental health?

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