John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, Part 1 of 3: Craft
The craft and skill which John Berryman pours into his 77 Dream Songs is often overshadowed by the intensity of the content of which he writes. With that in mind, I am splitting my comments on 77 Dream Songs into a three post series.
- Part 1 will focus on craft comments.
- Part 2 will discuss connections among the content.
- Part 3 will give a list of links for further reading and listening/viewing.
A Disclaimer Before Going On:
A Poet Reads… is meant to show one poet’s mind at work–mine. It’s not meant to be the one-and-only source of truth about a given work. This isn’t a scholarly treatise, nor is it exactly a review. It’s a compilation of thoughts based on what I’ve been reading. As such, it necessarily will revolve around my own ideas of craft and my particular interests. I hope you find it helpful or interesting. Maybe it prompts you to read work new to you or gives you additional consideration about something already familiar to you. But I can’t make any guarantees. Your mileage may vary.
Background
If you have read Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, you already know the framework within which we are working. In case you have not, here it is in (very) short:
- Berryman writes each poem as a 3-stanza entity, most of them just numbered, although occasionally they are titled as well.
- Each stanza is 6 lines, sometimes with end-rhyme and sometimes not, and often not the same rhyme scheme from stanza to stanza.
- Berryman’s narrator of the Dream Songs is a character he calls Henry. A sort of alter-ego, whom Berryman claimed was not himself.
- I think of Henry as a series of aspects of Berryman, especially Berryman in a dream, or perhaps drunken, or a highly disturbed state.
- Henry has a friend who is variously called Mr. Bones or calls Henry by the name of Mr. Bones. If you view some of the videos or listen to recordings of Berryman which you can find online, you will hear him explain it both ways. In either case, this friend is yet another aspect of Henry, therefore yet another aspect of Berryman.
- Henry refers to himself in the first and third person in the poems. And sometimes in the second person.
- Berryman is considered a primary poet of the Confessional school. He often dealt with formerly-taboo subjects such as depression, alcoholism, guilt, suicide, lust– that which would otherwise have been alluded to only obliquely in more traditional American poetry.
I believe a poet can only separate herself just so far from the poem. That doesn’t make every poem autobiographical–far from it. But every poem has a connection to the poet, and over time and many poems, those connections add up to a bigger picture. Perhaps bigger than the poet intended to provide.
Berryman wrote many more Dream Songs after this book was pubished, eventually numbering almost 400. I am limiting my discussion to the first book of dream songs: 77 Dream Songs.
My Incoming Biases
I admit I’ve been put off in the past by what I consider Berryman’s misogyny and racism. Yet at the same time, his language is haunting, evocative of a troubled, depressed, anxious mind-state, one not easily created without melodrama.
So many confessional poems achieve impact via melodrama or inclusion of purposely sensational details (says me). Berryman did it in plain language, in very few words and lines. This is one thing that makes his work so interesting to me.
Berryman also played with form, allusion to poets, poems, historical events…each of his Dream Songs is like a little puzzle, some more puzzling than others, and many of lasting interest.
A poet of few words
Berryman is a master of getting a mood, idea, or comment across in just a few words. Look at the first poem of 77 Dream Songs for proof. The opening lines set the stage for the book:
Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,–a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.
Isn’t this exactly like you see in many people? Maybe even yourself.
No matter their specific issue, they “should have come out and talked.” Perhaps their problems are minor. Or maybe they are great festering wounds. Either way, instead of talking they huff, sulk, are unappeasable. They read into others’ actions the thoughts and opinions they are most afraid of, whether factual or not.
Dream Song 1 ends:
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.
The sea’s action wears upon the land, and the land cannot escape it. Whether you view the sea to represent Henry’s own obsessions or not, eventually each must wake. Each must himself wrestle those demons which keep him from sleeping, which continually wear against the individual’s self and soul.
Wrestling those concerns is the bailiwick of the remaining poems.
Dream Song 29 uses stops to haunt us
This is one of the Dream Songs which you can watch Berryman read. It’s chilling.
The language is not sensationalized. What resonates is the human mind trying reconcile, again and again, the horror it believes it is capable of with the lack of evidence that it has acted on that capability. The beginning and end of the poem stick with the reader.
Here is the poem, not in it’s entirety:
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.…
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.
Who hasn’t woken from a dream to wonder what is real? Who hasn’t tried to match internal to external world? In the case of Henry, the problem occurs often. But even if you have only experienced it once, you know the feeling. You feel certain something awful has happened, or you yourself have done something terrible. Yet, at the same time, you feel it has never happened.
This is the mind desperately trying to come to grips with a factual reality that doesn’t match the emotional reality.
Berryman has represented this moment without the more outrageous or flamboyant similes occasionally found in confessional poetry. There are only 46 words in this poem, 36 after considering repetition. Few of them stand out as anything beyond everyday language.
Here they are. For the repeated words, the number of times each appears in the poem is shown in parenthesis.
| and (3) | ever | is | pieces |
| anyone | everyone | knows | reckons |
| as | found | may | the (2) |
| be | hacks | missing (2) | them |
| body | he (5) | never | they |
| but | Henry | nobody | thought |
| dawn | her | nobody’s | up (2) |
| did (2) | hide | often | went |
| end | in | over | where |
The language is common, colloquial, precise without being clinical, yet disturbing. The most unusual words are hacks and reckons. Neither of which are all that melodramatic.
When the normal becomes abnormal, isn’t that the most disturbing situation of all?
Number 29 might not be so disturbing, if it weren’t for the final three lines.
After “hide the pieces, where they may be found” it was possible for the poem to go in many directions — graphic, imaginary, gritty, bloody, witty, self-deprecating, darker or lighter, more or less sane.
Berryman takes none of those options. He keeps the poem from falling into maudlin sorrow or graphic imagination. In the same way, presumably, the speaker (and perhaps the poet) maintains himself in that narrow gray zone. One where nothing is truly known, and fact does not quite overcome fear.
The more you stop and think, the worse it gets…
Key to this giving this obsessive, desperate yet oh so logical impression is the placement of the punctuation stops of the final three lines. They convey halting discomfort in 7 partial or full stops. Gears grinding, then moving forward again.
Berryman employs the seven stops within the space of 10 beats, followed by three stressed syllables in the final line. The speaker reaches a conclusion he can neither explain nor deny.
Below, I’ve rearranged the lines to show each stop at the end of a line, and also noted the stressed syllables in bold. This makes it easier to visualize where each stop falls.
When analyzing how a poem works, I find it is sometimes helpful to take it apart and rearrange it. As it is helpful to take an engine apart to fully understand how all its parts function together.
He knows:
he went over everyone,
& nobody’s missing.
Often,
he reckons,
in the dawn,
them up.
Nobody is ever missing.
Putting the lines back into Berryman’s form, but retaining the bold where syllables are stressed, gives:
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often, he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.
In addition to the stops and stresses, notice the repetitions. The same syllable is repeated: the “ev” of “everyone” and “ever”, the “miss” in “missing” twice, the homophonic “no” in “knows,” “nobody,” and “nobody’s”, which assonates with the long o of “over”. And the v of “ov” itself alliterates twice with “ev”.
The repetition of sound carries the poem from stressed syllable to stressed syllable, without drawing too much attention to itself yet as inexorably as if one was connected to the next by monofilament. And the speaker–and reader / listener — are being reeled in. It’s inevitable that the speaker go over and over the situation and find the same conclusion, no matter how unbelievable it seems.
As a side note, notice the use of the ampersand instead of spelling out the word “and”. While these give the same meaning, the and of “&” flies by as almost a breath, and certainly isn’t stressed, the way that “and,” written out, could potentially be emphasized.
In the midst of these stressed syllables, the second-to-last line stands out for it’s lack of connection to the sound of the lines that have gone before. Instead of being in the thoughts of the speaker, we are suddenly outside, watching Henry as he is watching himself, reckoning in the dark, the light of dawn coming on.
And what “dawns” on him? In addition to it dawning on him that no one is missing, it dawns on him –and we are dropped back inside the mind as it concludes, swift as the dawn comes–“Nobody is ever missing.”
Well, go ahead and sleep well after that.
I dare you.
Next time:
In part 2, I will delve into the connections, primarily of content, which drive 77 Dream Songs, as a larger work.
In part 3, I have a roundup of links for further reading, listening, or viewing, and a commentary on the ruthlessness of the internet.
Comments:
There are loads of places on the web that discuss Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs and, in particular, number 29. Their take may not match mine, and perhaps yours doesn’t either. But that’s the advantage (or perhaps, disadvantage) of a dream / waking nightmare — it is open to many interpretations. So please feel free to share yours — I’d love to hear your take on 77 Dream Songs in the comments!