The Dream Songs by John Berryman

First published: 1969 (complete; originally published in 77 Dream Songs, 1964; and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, 1968)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Begun in 1955, The Dream Songs combines two volumes, 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968). The series of 385 songs is an ongoing, evolving account that mixes historical facts with autobiographical material, current events with philosophy, and archetypal myths with vaudeville humor. John Berryman is often associated with the confessional school of poetry, a style popular in the United States during the 1950’s and 1960’s and connected with the careers of Berryman’s contemporaries Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Sylvia Plath. The design of The Dream Songs (that of a series of lyrics organized around a central motif) has roots in literary tradition, including Don Juan (1819-1824, 1826) by the British Romantic writer Lord Byron, and Cantos (1930-1970) by the American poet of the twentieth century, Ezra Pound. Berryman cited Walt Whitman, the nineteenth century American poet, as his model, claiming that he designed the poem after Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1855). In 1965, 77 Dream Songs won a Pulitzer Prize; His Toy, His Dream, His Rest won the National Book Award in 1969.

At first glance, the collection seems loose, spontaneous, and improvised, but actually the individual poems are tightly structured, and they adhere technically and thematically to a complex poetic strategy. Each of Berryman’s songs consists of 18 lines broken into three stanzas of six lines each. The meter is well regulated, utilizing speech patterns ranging from a parody of beatnik black dialect to baby talk to academic jargon. It takes the attitude of a hip literary insider during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. In his 1979 essay “How to Read Berryman’s Dream Songs,” Professor Edward Mendelson points out an even more severe, “arithmetical precision” as a further unifying scheme built around the number seven. He demonstrates “seventy-seven Songs in the first volume . . . 77 x 5 in the completed 385 Songs . . . seven epigraphs; seven Books in all.” The songs also suggest a plot, not in a linear episodic sequence of events, but as a quest of the poet’s search for himself, seeking a fixed, centered ego.

Books 1 through 3 detail the metaphysical angst of Henry, the main character, recounting events and meditations. Henry is self-obsessed, petty, brilliant, dysfunctional, and damned by his need for meaning, for transcendence. The characters—including friends, enemies and acquaintances—are “zoned!” and “screwed up” or they are intellectual hustlers with their own lives to waste. Mixing slang with formal diction, discordant meter with perfect lyrical rhythms, Berryman combines pedantry with a street-smart style to portray a tragicomical blend of voices, personas, embodied in the polymorphous figure of Henry. In the preface to the one-volume edition of The Dream Songs (1969), Berryman writes, “The poem, then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in his early middle age, sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof.”

This “irreversible loss” may be traced, despite the disclaimer, to Berryman’s own loss of innocence. When Berryman was twelve, his father shot himself to death outside the boy’s window. His life after his father’s suicide was punctuated by transience and dissolution, although he managed to garner prestigious poetry awards and various teaching positions, notably at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Minnesota. Married three times, Berryman spent years fighting alcoholism, infidelity, and madness, and finally began to lose faith in his craft as a poet. The incessant strife and psychological turmoil that began so early in his life, and which is so evident in The Dream Songs, culminated in his own suicide in 1972.

As the title The Dream Songs suggests, the poems are extremely private, subjective, and personal, but as songs they are also by design public, objective, and communal. Many are introspective, confessional, self-incriminating reports from the edge of madness. Others are elegies for Berryman’s contemporaries; others read like barstool editorials on political events of the day; still others come off as bitter lectures on the ironies of history. What unites the poems is the strength of the poet’s personality. Berryman’s genius for detail, his precise phrasing, and his unrelenting insight into the heart of human experience keep The Dream Songs from sinking into maudlin self-pity. The work is laced with passionate pessimism, and too often the ironic aside devolves into sour invective; nevertheless, the cynical recitals of spiritual vacuity are tempered by Berryman’s stoic resignation, hope bred from despair.

The first song establishes Henry’s disillusionment and withdrawal, contrasting his expectations with the reality he finds himself living in. The opening stanza suggests an existential conspiracy, in which “unappeasable Henry” senses that he has been fooled into believing in the possibility of happiness and fulfillment and is suspicious of “a trying to put things over.” The second stanza implies that there was a time when Henry had faith in life, when “All the world like a woolen lover/ once did seem on Henry’s side.” Some event, a “departure,” presumably Berryman’s father’s death, qualifies Henry’s sense of a benevolent world ripe with opportunity and promise. He feels exposed, “pried/ open,” and in the third stanza seems astounded at the suffering that “the world can bear & be” (playing on the meanings of “bear”) amazed that the world can produce and accept his suffering—and “be.” Henry is astounded that the world exists at all and that to exist is to suffer. Once in Henry’s youth he was “glad/ all at the top, and I sang.” He sees life as a constant erosion, in which all endeavors lead to the same conclusion: “empty grows every bed.”

The Dream Songs is, at heart, a romantic poem. In the need to discover the root of his failure in an impossible dream of transcendence, Henry becomes a tragic rebel, resenting his freedom as much as he craves it. He is a victim of his own limitations and is haunted by the infinite possibilities of his life. His muse is “Filling her compact & delicious body/ with chicken páprika.” After all the strategies and evasions, “life, friends, is boring” and offers as much spiritual nourishment as “a handkerchief sandwich,” the only question for Henry is: “Where did it all go wrong?” The punishment of living does not seem to fit the crime of existence. Even though “There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart/ so heavy,” he is confused by the severity of the penitence he extracts from himself. His crime is against himself, and he complains that he would never “end anyone and hacks her body up/ and hide the pieces, where they may be found.”

Book 4, the Op. posth. (opus posthumous section, songs 78-91), describes Henry’s symbolic death, as he is “flared out in history.” Snuffing out his will, “nourished he less & less/ his subject body.” His message from the grave is filled with as much remorse as acrimony. He is both satisfied and bewildered by his condition. In his desire for selflessness, he feels “something bizarre about Henry, slowly sheared off.” As he begins the process of ego extinction, he is left with only “his eyeteeth and one block of memories” which prove “enough for him.” After all, he claims, it is “a nice pit” and “the knowledge they will take off your hands” keeps him free from the mundane habits—typewriters and deadlines—that infuriate and deaden his life. While he admits that “It would not be easy, accustomed to these things,/ to give up the old world,” Henry gives it his best shot. Bound by guilt to experience, he hopes “Henry’s brow of stainless steel/ rests free,” but unable to absolve himself from the crimes of his conscience, “returning to our life/ adult & difficult,” he is “collected and dug up.” His return to the world is measured by “accumulated taxes” and wives “glued/ to disencumbered Henry’s many ills.” Seduced by the opportunity death affords him “to fold/ him over himself quietly,” he “muttered for a double rum” and began “with a shovel/ digging like mad, Lazarus with a plan/ to get his own back.”

Book 5 continues to catalog his psychic convalescence during a lengthy hospital stay. Caught in a cycle of recovery and relapse, his only recourses are to transform his world or to lose it. Berryman relies on his craft for salvation, in the transforming process of the imagination, rebounding with stoic persistence from one defeat after another. This attempt to impose poetic form on the contingencies of existence culminates for Berryman in book 6, beginning with a sequence of elegies for Berryman’s contemporary, American poet Delmore Schwartz, “the new ghost/ haunting Henry most,” before continuing through a hodgepodge of meditations, migrations, literary gossip, as “wanderers on coasts lookt for the man/ actual, having encountered all his ghost.” The existential travelogue ends in book 7 with the poet in exile—literally—in Ireland, “Leaving behind the country of the dead.” In Dublin, surrounded by ghosts, Berryman seems to have discovered a unified voice. The songs become more conversational, less daring. The device of the minstrel from the early songs is abandoned. The delivery becomes almost occasional, resembling letters from the poet to himself. The enervation evident in the later songs of book 7 may, however, be an inevitable result of the theme of the collection. The Dream Songs is about the poet’s search for the form to contain experience, and therefore to control the world of the self. The shifts in syntax and perspective that mark the early songs are resolved in book 7, and the poet’s project—the synthesis of experience and form in the completion of the self—is finished. In fact, the last two songs return to the poet’s original source of disillusionment: Berryman as covictim of his father’s suicide. The poet makes “this awful pilgrimage” only to “spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave/ who shot his heart out.” Murderous with grief and anger, he will “ax the casket open ha to see/ just how he’s taking it.” Berryman’s self-destruction, his “final card,” may have been merely the poet’s last futile attempt to find “a middle ground between things and the soul.”

Bibliography

Coleman, Philip, and Philip McGowan, eds.“After Thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. The contributors to this collection seek to reevaluate and restore interest in Berryman’s work. The essays include discussions of Berryman and the twentieth century sonnet and Berryman and Shakespearean autobiography, as well as five essays offering various interpretations of The Dream Songs.

Dodson, Samuel Fisher. Berryman’s Henry: Living at the Intersection of Need and Art. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. Dodson’s detailed analysis of The Dream Works seeks to provide “the beginning reader and scholar with a map for approaching” the structure and thematic focus of the poem. He includes information about the poem’s language, stylistic innovations, epic qualities, and elegiac movement, as well as reproductions of more than thirty draft manuscripts of the work.

Kelly, Richard, and Alan K. Lathrop, eds. Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. A broad approach to Berryman’s art and life. Includes Lewis Hyde’s controversial essay “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking.”

Mariani, Paul. Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman. New York: William Morrow, 1990. An exhaustive biography drawing on interviews and anecdotes from Berryman’s colleagues and acquaintances. Attempts to connect Berryman’s life with his work, stressing autobiographical elements in The Dream Songs.

Matterson, Stephen. Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1987. Explores Berryman’s career in the context of his contemporary, Robert Lowell. Discusses the “theme of disintegration” prevalent in Berryman’s work.

Mendelson, Edward. “How to Read Berryman’s Dream Songs.” In American Poetry Since 1960, edited by Robert B. Shaw. Cheadle Hulme, England: Carcanet Press, 1973. A brief but detailed analysis of The Dream Songs, providing an overview of the complete series as well as detailed explications of selected poems; relies less on biographical material than on the more formal poetic structures and strategies.

Thomas, Harry, ed. Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. Provides a broad cultural context for Berryman’s work and a close critical analysis of his poetry.