April 12, 2008: from Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, John Berryman
from Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
John Berryman
[1]
The Governor your husband lived so long
moved you not, restless, waiting for him? Still,
you were a patient woman.ó
I seem to see you pause here still:
Sylvester, Quarles, in moments odd you pored
before a fire at, bright eyes on the Lord,
all the children still.
‘Simon …’ Simon will listen while you read a Song.
[2]
Outside the New World winters in grand dark
white air lashing high thro’ the virgin stands
foxes down foxholes sigh,
surely the English heart quails, stunned.
I doubt if Simon than this blast, that sea,
spares from his rigour for your poetry
more. We are on each other’s hands
who care. Both of our worlds unhanded us. Lie stark,
[3]
thy eyes look to me mild. Out of maize & air
your body’s made, and moves. I summon, see,
from the centuries it.
I think you won’t stay. How do we
linger, diminished, in our lovers’ air,
implausibly visible, to whom, a year,
years, over interims; or not;
to a long stranger; or not; shimmer & disappear.
[…]
[30] And out of this I lull. It lessens. Kiss me.
That once. As sings out up in sparkling dark
a trail of a star & dies,
while the breath flutters, sounding, mark,
so shorn ought such caresses to us be
who, deserving nothing, flush and flee
the darkness of that light,
a lurching frozen from a warm dream. Talk to me.
Read the full poem here.
[John Berryman is most well known for his Dream Songs (some of which I’ve posted before), but his first major poem was the long Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, about Anne Bradstreet, a Puritan settler and the first published poet in colonial America. Berryman has a way of bouncing between speakers (the first three stanzas here in his voice, the last in Bradstreet’s) and a weird twisty syntax that make his poems challenging and really unique. I love how he uses this careful, complicated language to talk about the practicalities of her life: her relationship with her husband Simon, the hard winters, or in the last stanza here, her recovery from smallpox. And in the rest of the poem, her trouble getting pregnant, childbirth, her family, her writing; I can’t think of any other poem that takes on history quite like this. And such fantastic lines: “Out of maize & air / your body’s made, and moves.”
Free music bonus: John Allyn Smith Sails, Okkervil River, about John Berryman, which cribs lines from a lot of the Dream Songs.]
A year ago: This Heavy Craft, P.K. Page
Two years ago:Late Ripeness, Czeslaw Milosz
Three years ago: A Martian Sends A Postcard Home, Craig Raine
