Eleven Addresses to the Lord by John Berryman

First published: 1970, in Love and Fame

Type of poem: Poetic sequence

The Poem

The title of “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” suggests its basic structure and intent. Eleven short poems, each capable of standing alone but enhanced by association with the others, compose the whole. Each poem is written in quatrains of varying line length; rhyme is often, though not consistently, used.

In the first address, Berryman (there is no perceivable distance between the persona-narrator and the author) praises God as the “Master of beauty” and the fashioner of things exquisitely small and lovely (the snowflake) and grandly inspiring (the earth). These are common ways of looking at God, but soon Berryman’s focus becomes more personal: God has come to his rescue “again and again” over the years. Had he not, the implication is quite clear, the narrator would have destroyed himself as so many of his friends have done. Both the praise of God’s creation and gratitude for his sustaining blessing are traditional poetic gestures. What is less traditional, however, is the open doubt expressed by the poet: “I have no idea whether we live again.”

The first address sets the pattern that the succeeding ten will follow in whole or in part: praise of God and his creation, gratitude for his assistance, and a strain of doubt that is sometimes subtle but elsewhere blatant enough to border on cynicism or sarcasm. Address 2 finds Berryman once again praising God the Creator and especially for his “certain goodness to me.” By the end of address 2, however, doubt once more encroaches: “I say Thy kingdom come,’ it means nothing to me.”

Addresses 3 and 4 are closely related. Three is perhaps the most conventional of the eleven poems. Here, Berryman prays that God will protect him from his sinful nature, which in the past, it is obvious from the allusions, has caused the author to hurt others as well as himself. Having called for God’s aid in the third address, in the fourth Berryman wonders whether God is there to hear his request and prays for strength and faith.

The fifth address narrows the focus to one specific question: What follows life? Probably the damned will suffer no pains of hell; the faithful will likely receive no heavenly reward, either. “Rest may be your ultimate gift,” Berryman surmises. The sixth address locates the source of Berryman’s conflicts with God and his fellow man. Until he was twelve, he served at Mass six days a week; then his father committed suicide, and thereafter, “Confusions & afflictions/ followed my days.”

The seventh address advises a desolate young woman to look to Justin Martyr’s words of wisdom. The eighth (“A Prayer for the Self”), ninth, and tenth addresses find Berryman asking for God’s blessing, as God blessed him before. In the eleventh address, Berryman cites martyrs who died for their faith and ends this moving poetic sequence by praying for the strength to bear up under whatever “Thou wilt award.”

Forms and Devices

Berryman has long been considered one of the twentieth century’s great innovators, a master manipulator of poetic conventions. These manipulations are most fully developed in The Dream Songs (1969) and are, to a degree at least, more muted in “Eleven Addresses to the Lord.” Nevertheless, Berryman provocatively utilizes many poetic devices to enhance the sequence’s complex interplay of sincerity and irony. Indeed, just as the poem thematically wavers between faith and doubt, its form varies from the almost anachronistically traditional to innovations that, especially in a context of conventional devices, are deliberately jarring.

At first glance the conventional elements seem to predominate. The title predisposes the reader to expect something traditional, “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” being as appropriate for the twelfth century as the twentieth. Moreover, the individual poems seem very close to Horation odes—that is, discourses on a single subject employing an unvarying stanzaic pattern. As with this centuries-old form, the language, initially at least, seems appropriately lofty and dignified.

Even if the reader did not recognize the Horatian ode form, however, one glance at the page would seem to promise poetic conventionality: All sections are written in apparently standard quatrains. This promise seems confirmed at the beginning of the poem, where God is described as “Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake”—imagery so traditional as to border on the trite. Proceeding through the poem, the reader encounters rhyme both internal and end, placing this sequence once more, apparently, in the conventional category.

Save for the quatrain, however, which is maintained throughout, these early impressions of stylistic conventionality are soon shattered. Line lengths vary with no apparent pattern. Predictably, the meter also varies, from as many as seven accented syllables per line to as few as two. This poem, which at first glance appears to be “old-fashioned” is, therefore, written in free verse. Similarly, although Berryman writes beautifully and rhythmically, the rhythm is less than conventional. Indeed, there is hardly a single line in the entire sequence that has a consistent rhythm (that is, entirely iambic or entirely trochaic).

When the reader turns to other apparently conventional features of the poem, a similar undermining of tradition is found. Berryman uses rhyme, for instance, but in no discernible pattern. Some of the addresses have no rhymes, others one or two or several. Moreover, the rhymes are rarely strong rhymes but are almost invariably slant rhymes (“begins” and “eloquence”; “done” and “come”) or combinations that barely hint of rhyme and can hardly be classified even as slant rhymes (“Paul” and “chair”; “man” and “doom”).

The diction and imagery are also deliberately inconsistent in tone and effect. “Through” is anachronistically and unnecessarily spelled “thro’,” while “and” is sometimes written using the modern stenographer’s ampersand (“&”). The syntax is sometimes so determinedly poetic as to be stilted (“cross am I sometimes”), while elsewhere Berryman throws in a slangy colloquialism: “Uh-huh.” And Berryman’s God may be “craftsman of the snowflake”—an image poets centuries ago would have been very comfortable with—but what medieval poet would dare describe part of God’s creation as the “boring Moon”? All of these deliberate inconsistencies serve to jar the reader out of complacency and underscore a thematic development that is equally ambiguous.

Bibliography

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