John Berryman

John Berryman's "Dream Songs" give us much to appreciate with only the small price of a little also to bemoan. The formal regularity of his 18-line poems forces him to be concise. Like a sonnet, each burst of eighteen lines must suggest and explore a single problem, though Berryman usually withholds a resolution. Though he doesn't depart too severely from standard American speech, Berryman's effort to incorporate rhyme and meter encourages productive phrasings. Here's an example from #95:

The surly cop lookt out at me in sleep
insect-like. Guess, who was the insect.
I'd asked him in my robe
& hospital gown in the elevator politely
why someone saw so many police around,
and without speaking he looked.

A meathead, and of course he was armed, to creep
across my nervous system some time ago wrecked.

The phrasing of "some time ago wrecked" preserves the rhyme, but it also emphasizes the damage by condemning it to the end of the line, broken over a full stop.

Thematically, Berryman often focuses on both the desires and the brittleness of the human body. While these interests sometimes manifest themselves in pure adolescence, they have compelling truth value, especially to those who stress the importance of "embodied knowledge." In Berryman, however, the body always seems to be in a state of disintegration. In #140, for example, "Henry is vanishing." Later in the poem "the poor man is coming to pieces joint by joint." This fading occurs in conjunction with anxiety over sexual impotence. In fact, the poems are structured by the same physiological and psychological stresses that mark impotence. This is not to say that the poems themselves are ineffective, merely that their effectiveness lies in the exploration of desire that recognizes its inherent unattainability: "Snowy of her breasts the drifts, I do believe, / although I have not been there" (from #248).