No, Berryman hasn't been mentioned. A pity---
he was really something. Dream Songs is,
I suppose, a failure overall, but if so, then
one worth more than most poets' successes. He
is almost always interesting, brilliant, funny,
inventive, and he can break your heart. Here
is the almost unbearable 145:
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
& and 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.
This is of course about his father's "suicide,"
all the more heartbreaking if you know that it was
probably not a suicide, that he was murdered by
the poet's mother and her lover. He, Berryman,
would be in thrall to his mother, that monstrous
woman, all his life, till his own suicide---which
was real. (Most of you are too young, I imagine,
to remember Whitman on his tower.)
Here's another Song, very different:
A shallow lake, with many waterbirds,
especially egrets: I was showing Mother around.
An extraordinary vivid dream
of Betty & Douglas, and Don---his mother's estate
was on the grounds of a lunatic asylum.
He showed me around.
A policeman trundled a siren up the walk.
It was 6:05 p.m., Don was late home.
I askt if he ever saw
the inmates--"No, they never leave their cells."
Betty was downstairs, Don called down, "A drink"
while showering.
I can't go into the meaning of the dream
except to say a sense of total loss
afflicted me thereof:
an absolute disappearance of continuity & love
and children away at school, the weight of the cross,
and everything is what it seems.
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