April 28, 2006: Dream Song 145, John Berryman
Dream Song 145
John Berryman
Also I love him: me he’s done no wrong
for going on forty years — forgiveness time —
I touch now his despair,
he felt as bad as Whitman on his tower
but he did not swim out with me or my brother
as he threatened —
a powerful swimmer, to take one of us along
as company in the defeat sublime,
freezing my helpless mother:
he only, very early in the morning,
rose with his gun and went outdoors by my window
and did what was needed.
I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong
& so undone. I’ve always tried. I — I’m
trying to forgive
whose frantic passage, when he could not live
an instant longer, in the summer dawn
left Henry to live on.
[The Dream Songs are written in a format John Berryman invented partly
to address the big issues that plagued him, most notably the suicide
of his father when Berryman was a child. I strongly recommend reading
more, because they vary wildly in tone and topic, can be very funny or
very sad, and are really unique in the way they play with syntax and
voice. A lot of them are an internal dialogue between a
Berryman-character called Henry and a voice of conscience and reason,
Mr. Bones, and this idea of the fragmentary self gets played out in
the last stanza of this poem: “I — I’m” Like he’s broken in two.
And I think this is such a beautiful and hard look at how you go about
trying to make yourself forgive someone for something so
unforgiveable.
If you’re interested, I linked quite a few other Berryman poems at the
bottom of this post from last year.]
A YEAR AGO TOAY: Having It Out With Melancholy, Jane Kenyon
