Idioms and Slang in Three of John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs
In John Berryman’s Dream Songs 37, 38, and 39, the expressive idioms and delectable slang characteristic of the Songs as a whole render moving and memorable this farewell to Robert Frost.
77 Dream Songs
The central character of 77 Dream Songs is Henry, who, Berrymn assures us, is neither the poet nor himself, but who refers to himself at various times in the first, third and even second persons. This, the poet Steven Cramer has said to me in conversation, “constitutes a key aspect of Berryman’s genius: how he orchestrates multiple voices in The Dream Songs—not just Henry’s dialogues with his friend. . . but a richer, more complex dynamic of tones, often at war with one another.” But some of these dialogues are surely the call and response of traditional African-American blues and spirituals. Henry uses black dialect and sometimes appears in blackface; he’s sometimes addressed by an unnamed friend as Mr Bones, and is sometimes Henry Hankovitzh, the guitar-player. Other characters, usually unnamed, come on stage, including a sassy, likable low life in Song 15:
‘You can biff me, you can bang me, get it you’ll never,
I may be only a Polack broad but I don’t lay easy.
Kiss my ass, that’s what you are.’
The settings in the dream songs are various: movie houses, bars, cabs, a madhouse, the Temple, MLA meetings, the Ganges, and what may be faculty meetings, award ceremonies, readings, and public appearances. The narrator is obsessed with the fame, booze, love, the loss of love, personal ruin, amends, and guilt. Others entangled in these obsessions are variously ex-wives, children, publishing executives (“publishingers”), god, the “Lord of Matter,” and often other poets and writers. Thrumming behind and through the songs are the tones and rhythms, the syncopations, razzle-dazzle, and deep melancholy of American blues and jazz. To capture these rhythms, and as a stay against sentimentality and boredom, Berryman skews syntax and diction and invents words in a parody of black dialect. For example, he often matches a second person singular pronoun with a third person verb, as in
you seems excited-like.
Another common oddity, among many, is the expression of something clearly in the past (and understood as such) with present tense.
“–What happen then, Mr. Bones?”
if be you cares to say. (DS 26)
Picking up and used to brilliant effect the language of inner city blacks, the poet was a master at parodying dialect.
Dear Song 37: Syncopated Rhythms
One essential of Berryman’s songs are their verve and quirkiness of the voice and the eccentricities of syntax and diction. They are mostly in three six-line stanzas, mostly iambic with some variation. Metrically, the first two lines of each stanza often, but by no means invariably, have five or four beats, followed by a two or three beat line; this pattern is repeated in the second triad of the stanza: pentameter or tetrameter followed by trimeter or dimeter.
Songs 37, 38, and 39 are a good place to begin looking at Berryman’s technique. Berryman groups these three Songs under the title Three around the Old Gentleman, the old gentleman being Robert Frost. If we haven’t guessed by the title, we know by the third line of Song 37 that these are elegies for the famous American poet.
Song 37 begins with as much variation as regularity in its meter:
His malice was a pimple down his good
big face, with its sly eyes. I must be sorry
Mr. Frost has left:
I like it so less I don’t understood–
he couldn’t hear or see well–all we sift–
but this is a bad story.
He had fine stories and was another man
in private; difficult, always. Courteous,
on the whole, in private.
He apologize to Henry, off & on,
for two blue slanders; which was good of him.
I don’t know how he made it.
Quickly, off stage with all but kindness, now.
I can’t say what I have in mind. Bless Frost,
any odd god around.
Gentle his shift, I decussate & command,
stoic deity. For a while here we possessed
an unusual man.
The first line of Song 37 is iambic pentameter (with a light second stress), but the second line has two spondees and a pyrrhic foot, as well as an iamb with an extra unstressed syllable, and the third line is trochaic trimester with an elided final syllable.
His mal/ice was / a pim/ple down / his good
big face, / with its / sly eyes. / I must / be sorry
Mister / Frost has / left
The two-beat third line, “Mr Frost has left,” comes abruptly after the first two lines. The first, biting line and a half–“His malice was a pimple down his good big face, with its sly eyes”–immediately and abruptly shifts to “I must be sorry/ Mr Frost has left”. Is this a softening? Is Henry truly sorry, or is he merely obliged to say so? These three sonnets on Frost swerve again and again between respect for–or perhaps at times a kind of infantile toadying up to– a powerful, master poet, on the one hand, and scorn for a poet of the Establishment who took none of the risks Berryman saw himself taking in his own, more experimental poems.
The very next line gives us the odd syntax we come to expect in the Dream Songs:
I like it so less I don’t understood
The stanzas of this first song in the sequence rhyme pretty neatly: ABCACB // AXCAAC // and ABAABA. Good is rhymed with understood, left with sift (S.1); private with made it (S. 2); but the really smart rhyme comes in S. 3, when Frost is rhymed with possessed, with it connotative association of the poet to one possessed. Stanza 2 brings in Henry by name:
He apologizes to Henry, off & on,
for two blue slanders; which was good of him.
In addition to the occasionally abrupt shifts in meter, there is a fluctuating rhyme scheme, alternating dissonance and harmony. The first stanza, above, rhymes ABCACB. But the second stanza of Dream Song 37 rhymes: AXCAAC:
He had fine stories and was another man
I private: difficult, always. Courteous,
On the whole, in private.
He apologize to Henry, off & on,
For two blue slanders; which was good of him.
I don’t know how he made it.
Courteous is unrhymed, unpaired, and unmet, perhaps because to someone with Berryman’s profound life traumas, courtesy must have seemed at times an absurd ritual, like tipping one’s hat in greeting on a ravaged battlefield.
Coming to Stanza 3 of Song 37, I first read lines 15 – 17 as meaning that Frost himself was an “odd god” or a “stoic deity,” rather than–what Berryman must have intended–the being to whom Henry appeals to bless the dead poet. For one thing, in an earlier version, published by New York Review of Books, the phrase is “idiot deity,” not “stoic deity,” and as Steven Cramer has again pointed out to me, Berryman would not have referred to Frost as idiotic, whatever the ambivalence of his feelings for the older poet.
In “Three around the Old Gentleman,” as elsewhere in the Dream Songs, Berryman can express what might be clichés and banalities were it not for Henry’s odd, torqued syntax and lingo. It is Henry Frost has slandered, not the poet John Berryman. Berryman’s daring lies in Henry’s saying what he actually thinks of Frost as a poet–one who “couldn’t hear or see well.” (What more damning words could you say of a poet than that he had no ear?!)
Henry, like Berryman the poet, likes a poetry that is less plainly understood, but to say this outright would be dull poetry, so instead we get—
I like it so less I don’t understood–
It is possible to read Henry has complaining that the plain-speaking language of Frost’s poems puts down the reader and deprives him of his active participation in the poem. See, for example, line 12 of the following song, Song 38:
And down with the listener.
If this is correct, then Berryman is boldly taking on the American poet of mid-Century. Is Berryman vindicated? Perhaps, in the way that subsequent American poets have celebrated experimentation and risk-taking with language over more tidy expressions and narratives. Experimental poets have largely remained on the sidelines of American poetry, but it’s hard to think of a poet writing today who has not been touched in some way by Berryman’s rebel assaults on syntax and diction. His stance has by and large been absorbed into the mainstream, if not actively imitated. Frost’s stature as a poet may not rest in his influence of poetic style. Ironic, though, that the virtually fatherless boy Berryman should become father, in his sad wild way, to so much in American poetry.
Stanza 3 of this first song in the sequence exposes Berryman’s mixed feelings about Frost the man, if not his poetry. “I can’t say what I have in mind,” he says (line 14). Frost, he says, was malicious and slanderous, but in private he could be courteous, he could apologize, “which was good of him” (line 11). Amid the confusion of feeling, the narrator can still say, as he concludes the first song in this sequence, “For a while here we possessed / an unusual man.”
Song 38 modulates the challenge to Frost, suggesting that Henry is to read and study the master, not simple challenge him. Thinking possibly of Frost’s lines on carpe diem, as well as his own plight, Henry quips in line 12:
And down with the listener.
Dream Song 38: Who’s Afraid of Mr Death?
DThe Russian grin bellows his condolence
t`o the family: ah but it’s Kay,
& Ted, & Chis & Anne,
Henry thinks of; who eased his fearful way
from here, in here, to there. This wants thought.
I won’t make it out.
Maybe the source of noble such may come
clearer to dazzled Henry. It may come,
I’d say it will come with pain,
In mystery. I’d rather leave it alone.
I do leave it alone.
And down with the listener.
Now he has become, abrupt, an industry.
Professional-Friends-Of-Robert-Frost all over
gap wide their mouths
while the quirky medium of so many truths
is quiet. Let’s be quiet. Let us listen:
–What for, Mr Bones?
–while he begins to have it out with Horace. (DS 38)
Song 38 begins with the puzzle of naming the referents. “Kay” is Kay Morrison, Frost’s lover, taken on soon after his wife’s death, and “Ted” may be Theodore Roethke, who would die later the same year (1963). The others may be friends who “eased” Frost in his last days. It is of these people that Henry thinks. The first stanza rhymes lines 5 and 6, but also lines 2 and 4: “Kay” with “way.” Notice the loose, casual, inventive, abbreviated way with words here:
. . . ah but I’s Kay,
& Ted, & Chris & Anne,
Henry thinks of; who eased his fearful way
from here, in here, to there. This wants thought.
I won’t make it out.
Berryman (or, not to be sentimental, Henry) is thinking of the people who helped Frost to die. But Berryman does not mention death. For this poet death is “there.” Thus does he iterate Henry’s capacity for dream, where the face of one’s enemy is often averted and unnamed.
. . . this wants thought.
I won’t make it out.
The usual locution might be, “This is worth thinking about” or “This deserves more thought.” The way Berryman pares his diction here, as elsewhere. Much could be said about death, and has been said, by poets (including, of course, Frost), but Henry won’t say it here—is Henry here demonstrating, as Steven Cramer queried, his skittishness about death?
Continuing from Stanza 1 to muse on thoughts of death, Stanza 2 of Song 38 actually plays a sad song about it, a clever riff enacting its grief on the passage from “here, to there” in the moaning sounds of the words ending each line: come, come, pain, alone, alone. The redemptive final line “And down with the listener,” the one who hears, and the poet who lists, spins its rhyme as early as the second word, down, off-rhyming internally with “come” and “alone.”. This second stanza embodies the riff referred to in Dream Song 39, Stanza 3, lines 1 and 2:
. . . we will blow our best,
Our sad wild riffs come easy I that case.
The third stanza of Dream Song 38 continues the progression from Stanzas 1 and 2, from “here” to “there” by taking us from dying and mourning to Immortality, in the only form we can know it, as literary debates. This stanza echoes one of the Dream Songs’ obsessions–literary fame:
Now he has become, abrupt, an industry.
Professional-Friends-Of-Robert-Frost all over
gap wide their mouths
while the quirky medium of so many truths
is quiet.
Listen for the staccato of that first line, held to an iambic beat:
Now he has become, abrupt, an industry
The more usual phrasing would be: Now he has abruptly become an industry. Frost’s poetry is, Berryman says, “the quirky medium of so many truths,” quiet now, while the literary critics, commentators, and journalists “gap wide their mouths.”
The final two lines of Song 38 at last address questions of enshrinement in the literary canon–in other words, “immortality,” but not quite in the mode Auden used in his elegy for Yeats. Here, a question to Mr Bones interjects the necessary levity.
–What for, Mr Bones? — –while he begins to have it out with Horace.
Berryman might have arranged “Frost” to rhyme with “Horace,” but he showed appropriate restraint. Mouths rhymed with truths is fresh and memorable, however. Other memorable rhymes in 77 Dream Songs are loss and sauce, and greasy and easy (DS 15), to list a few. There are also the almost rhymes of strut and Roethke (DS 18); guitar and pray (DS 31).
Dream Song 39: The Idioms of Death
Goodbye, sir, & fare well. You’re in the clear.
‘Nobody’ (Mark says you said) ‘is ever found out.’
I figure you were right,
having as Henry got away with murder
for long. Some jarred clock tell me it’s late,
not for you who went straight
but for the lorn. Our roof is lefted off
lately: the shooter, and the bourbon man,
and then you got tired.
I’m afraid that’s it. I figure you with love,
lifey, deathy, but I have a little sense
the rest of us are fired
or fired: be with us: we will blow our best,
our sad wild riffs come easy in that case,
thinking you over,
knowing you resting, who was reborn to rest,
your gorgeous sentence done. Nothing’s the same,
Sir, –taking cover.
Having it out with Horace in a strictly Platonic universe is one thing. Now, in Dream Song 39, we seem to inhabit an underworld of gangsters, shooters careless with life and drunk on Bourbon, either that or a speakeasy jazz club, where we blow “our sad wild riffs.” Henry must have it out with himself and his own fate, his final reckoning in the literary world, as he has been wont to do throughout these dream songs. First, he addresses Frost directly and intimately:
Goodbye, sir, & fare well. You’re in the clear.
Frost is in the end “in the clear,” even though he has “got away with murder” for years. “I figure you with love, / lifey, deathy,” Henry says, in a quasi-drunken monologue, following a reference to himself as “the bourbon man.” How else would you contemplate your own life and death except slightly–or more than slightly–inebriated? Again, Henry is telling is how it is, not how it should be. He’s left Frost and Horace to that.
But in the end, inebriated, mournful Henry and his pals at the bar “will blow our best, / our sad wild riffs come easy [. . .] / thinking you over,/ knowing you resting.” With his pals or the other literati, he’s fired (from his job, for bad behavior (as, maybe, Frost should have been had he ever been “found out”). He’s also “fired,” meaning inspired to write some verse and play some blues, “blow our best, / our sad wild riffs”. Henry’s Song mimics his own slurred, inebriated speech. Henry’s idiomatic American English enriches Song 39 with slang that moves up and down like the telescoping slide of a trombone: “found out,” “went straight,” “fired,” “blow,” “sentence,” and “taking cover” evoke layered connotations and multiple meanings. And in a stock phrases like “you’re in the clear,” “the shooter,” “the bourbon man,” “got away with murder,” Berryman seems to evoke a whole era of gangster movies and film noir.
Compared to, say, Auden’s elegy for W.B. Yeats, Berryman’s elegiac songs to Frost skirt simple closure now that The Poet is dead. He risks complaint, sniffing at the taboos by speaking with less than wholehearted favor of the dead, cataloging Frost’s malice, his sly eyes, his slanderous comments about other poets. Yet there is a moving quality in Henry’s railing against Frost, as against human fate embodied in all father figures to their woe-begone sons. And in the third Song of this sequence, Henry acknowledges is affection, allegiance, and awe of the master who “went straight,” and for whom “we will blow our best,/ our sad wild riffs.”