The Heart Is Strange (5 page)

This is a new poetic. Here, he is turning away from the self. In “Matins”:

However, lo, across what wilderness

in vincible ignorance past forty years

lost to (as now I see) Your sorrowing

I strayed abhorrent, blazing with my Self.

Here, he is trying to submit. In “Nones”:

I am olding & ignorant, and the work is great,

daylight is long, will ever I be done,

for the work is not for man, but the Lord God.

Now I have prepared with all my might for it

The drama and the tension—the beauty—of these late poems is that of a man torn between the fascinations of the self and the chance of a greater order. He is never wholly convinced. He is at best a “pseudo-monk,” as he calls himself in “Terce,” but the cycle of prayers enacts a drama of submission. This is not easy. It ends: “This fireless house / lies down at Your disposal as usual! Amen!”

On the morning of Friday, January 7, 1972, Berryman took the bus from his home to the university, but instead of going to his office he walked onto the Washington Avenue Bridge. He climbed over the railing, and then—according to one witness—waved goodbye before jumping. His body landed on the embankment of the west side of the Mississippi River. This great poet of shifting personalities could only be identified by the blank check in his pocket, and his glasses, which had his name on the frame.

There is a strong temptation to read Berryman’s life as tragic, to see in it a parable of art and suffering. His biographers and critics find it hard to resist this precisely because Berryman himself leads them to it. In 1955, he wrote a fragmentary memoir of his school days, and he called it “It Hurts to Learn Anything”; throughout his life he repeatedly expressed his belief in a kind of equation of suffering and creativity. In 1965, when asked by a newspaper interviewer about the elements of good poetry, he replied, “Imagination, love, intellect—and pain. Yes, you’ve got to know pain.” He repeated this in his interview with
The Paris Review
, which was carried out in the fall of 1970. There, he said, “The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him.” This is a Romantic idea, of authority won by hurt, and poetry as dark knowledge, and it is bound up with Berryman’s own brooding upon his death. In a poem from the late 1950s called “The Poet’s Final Instructions,” he explains his wishes for his funeral: “Bury me in a hole, and give a cheer, / near Cedar on Lake Street, where the used cars live.” In his suicide, Berryman seemed to write a fit conclusion to this version of his life.

I don’t want to leave him like this, however, as a poet of retrospect and endings, as an artist of the grave. This misses something his writing life powerfully was: a joy of voices, antic and alive. There is the tragic urge, but there is also its counter: the pull toward life. In a very late Dream Song—written, according to his biographer Paul Mariani, in 1969, after the publication of
His Toy, His Dream, His Rest
, which completes the Dream Songs—Berryman considered this divided sense:

A human personality, that’s impossible.

The lines of nature & of will, that’s impossible.

I give the whole thing up.

His larger project, across his life, was the attempt to capture in verse “a human personality,” and the challenge remained daunting. But then he turns before the poem finishes:

Only there resides a living voice

which if we can make we make it out of choice

not giving the whole thing up.

—Daniel Swift

FROM

The Dispossessed

(1948)

Winter Landscape

The three men coming down the winter hill

In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds

At heel, through the arrangement of the trees,

Past the five figures at the burning straw,

Returning cold and silent to their town,

Returning to the drifted snow, the rink

Lively with children, to the older men,

The long companions they can never reach,

The blue light, men with ladders, by the church

The sledge and shadow in the twilit street,

Are not aware that in the sandy time

To come, the evil waste of history

Outstretched, they will be seen upon the brow

Of that same hill: when all their company

Will have been irrecoverably lost,

These men, this particular three in brown

Witnessed by birds will keep the scene and say

By their configuration with the trees,

The small bridge, the red houses and the fire,

What place, what time, what morning occasion

Sent them into the wood, a pack of hounds

At heel and the tall poles upon their shoulders,

Thence to return as now we see them and

Ankle-deep in snow down the winter hill

Descend, while three birds watch and the fourth flies.

The Disciple

Summoned from offices and homes, we came.

By candle-light we heard him sing;

We saw him with a delicate length of string

Hide coins and bring a paper through a flame;

I was amazed by what that man could do.

And later on, in broad daylight,

He made someone sit suddenly upright

Who had lain long dead and whose face was blue.

But most he would astonish us with talk.

The warm sad cadence of his voice,

His compassion, and our terror of his choice,

Brought each of us both glad and mad to walk

Beside him in the hills after sundown.

He spoke of birds, of children, long

And rubbing tribulation without song

For the indigent and crippled of this town.

Ventriloquist and strolling mage, from us,

Respectable citizens, he took

The hearts and swashed them in an upland brook,

Calling them his, all men’s, anonymous.

. . He gained a certain notoriety;

The magical outcome of such love

The State saw it could not at all approve

And sought to learn where when that man would be.

The people he had entertained stood by,

I was among them, but one whom

He harboured kissed him for the coppers’ doom,

Repenting later most bitterly.

They ran him down and drove him up the hill.

He who had lifted but hearts stood

With thieves, performing still what tricks he could

For men to come, rapt in compassion still.

Great nonsense has been spoken of that time.

But I can tell you I saw then

A terrible darkness on the face of men,

His last astonishment; and now that I’m

Old I behold it as a young man yet.

None of us now knows what it means,

But to this day our loves and disciplines

Worry themselves there. We do not forget.

A Point of Age, Part I

At twenty-five a man is on his way.

The desolate childhood smokes on the dead hill,

My adolescent brothels are shut down

For industry has moved out of that town;

Only the time-dishonoured beggars and

The flat policemen, victims, I see still.

Twenty-five is a time to move away.

The travelling hands upon the tower call,

The clock-face telescopes a long desire:

Out of the city as the autos stream

I watch, I whisper, Is it time . . time?

Fog is enveloping the bridges, lodgers

Shoulder and fist each other in the mire

Where later, leaves, untidy lives will fall.

Companions, travellers, by luck, by fault

Whose none can ever decide, friends I had

Have frozen back or slipt ahead or let

Landscape juggle their destinations, slut

Solace and drink drown the degraded eye.

The fog is settling and the night falls, sad,

Across the forward shadows where friends halt.

Images are the mind’s life, and they change.

How to arrange it—what can one afford

When ghosts and goods tether the twitching will

Where it has stood content and would stand still

If time’s map bore the brat of time intact?

Odysseys I examine, bed on a board,

Heartbreak familiar as the heart is strange.

In the city of the stranger I discovered

Strike and corruption: cars reared on the bench

To horn their justice at the citizen’s head

And hallow the citizen deaf, half-dead.

The quiet man from his own window saw

Insane wind take the ash, his favourite branch

Wrench, crack; the hawk came down, the raven hovered.

Slow spent stars wheel and dwindle where I fell.

Physicians are a constellation where

The blown brain sits a fascist to the heart.

Late, it is late, and it is time to start.

Sanction the civic woe, deal with your dear,

Convince the stranger: none of us is well.

We must travel in the direction of our fear.

The Traveller

They pointed me out on the highway, and they said

‘That man has a curious way of holding his head.’

They pointed me out on the beach; they said ‘That man

Will never become as we are, try as he can.’

They pointed me out at the station, and the guard

Looked at me twice, thrice, thoughtfully & hard.

I took the same train that the others took,

To the same place. Were it not for that look

And those words, we were all of us the same.

I studied merely maps. I tried to name

The effects of motion on the travellers,

I watched the couple I could see, the curse

And blessings of that couple, their destination,

The deception practiced on them at the station,

Their courage. When the train stopped and they knew

The end of their journey, I descended too.

The Ball Poem

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,

What, what is he to do? I saw it go

Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then

Merrily over—there it is in the water!

No use to say ‘O there are other balls’:

An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy

As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down

All his young days into the harbour where

His ball went. I would not intrude on him,

A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now

He senses first responsibility

In a world of possessions. People will take balls,

Balls will be lost always, little boy,

And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.

He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,

The epistemology of loss, how to stand up

Knowing what every man must one day know

And most know many days, how to stand up

And gradually light returns to the street,

A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,

Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark

Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere,

I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move

With all that move me, under the water

Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

The Spinning Heart

The fireflies and the stars our only light,

We rock, watching between the roses night

If we could see the roses. We cannot.

Where do the fireflies go by day, what eat?

What categories shall we use tonight?

The day was an exasperating day,

The day in history must hang its head

For the foul letters many women got,

Appointments missed, men dishevelled and sad

Before their mirrors trying to be proud.

But now (we say) the sweetness of the night

Will hide our imperfections from our sight,

For nothing can be angry or astray,

No man unpopular, lonely, or beset,

Where half a yellow moon hangs from a cloud.

Spinning however and balled up in space

All hearts, desires, pewter and honeysuckle,

What can be known of the individual face?

To the continual drum-beat of the blood

Mesh sea and mountain recollection, flame,

Motives in the corridor, touch by night,

Violent touch, and violence in rooms;

How shall we reconcile in any light

This blow and the relations that it wrecked?

Crescent the pressures on the singular act

Freeze it at last into its season, place,

Until the flood and disorder of Spring.

To Easterfield the court’s best bore, defining

Space tied into a sailor’s reef, our praise:

He too is useful, he is part of this,

Inimitable, tangible, post-human,

And Theo’s disappointment has a place,

An item in that metamorphosis

The horrible coquetry of aging women.

Our superstitions barnacle our eyes

To the tide, the coming good; or has it come?—

Insufficient upon the beaches of the world

To drown that complex and that bestial drum.

Triumphant animals,—upon the rest

Bearing down hard, brooding, come to announce

The causes and directions of all this

Biting and breeding,—how will all your sons

Discover what you, assisted or alone,

Staring and sweating for seventy years,

Could never discover, the thing itself?

                                                             Your fears,

Fidelity, and dandelions grown

As big as elephants, your morning lust

Can neither name nor control. No time for shame,

Whippoorwill calling, excrement falling, time

Rushes like a madman forward. Nothing can be known.

The Possessed

This afternoon, discomfortable dead

Drift into doorways, lounge, across the bridge,

Whittling memory at the water’s edge,

And watch. This is what you inherited.

Random they are, but hairy, for they chafe

All in their eye, enlarging like a slide;