Ah, bathos! Julie, what a way to wreck a Dickinson poem ;D
I meant to say earlier that bathos is the Main Funny Thing in the poem Mary posted above. The tone of the first speaker is so stiff and correct that he can be punctured just by the lowbrow pronunciation "da." That one does crack me up.
And putting the superego and the id together like that is part of the action in the John Berryman poem that Bill posted, too. I do think you have to know something about the characters--that Henry is the speaker and main character, that Mr. Bones is a sort of alter ego--to glom on to the situation. Even Lowell was none too sure what Berryman was saying in the Dream Songs: "At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness. After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn't trust myself to paraphrase accurately at least half the sections."
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