#14

http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/Berryman.14.html

Pretty much every modern poetry anthology from the last 50 years has this poem in it, so if anyone is bored with Dream Song 14, I sympathize. Sometimes I worry that “Life, friends, is boring” might be going the way of “Then my heart with pleasure fills / And dances with the daffodils.” I’ve taken on the challenge of discussing that poem with 19-year-old guys, lined up along the back row with their ball caps low over their eyes, arms crossed, daring me to call on them. My approach was generally along the lines of, we’re talkin’ daffodils today, fellas. But yeah, it does take a committed Romantic sensibility anymore not to roll your eyes at Wordsworth’s old-fashioned couplet. But 14 avoids weary Romantic earnestness—quite the opposite—and I probably needn’t worry.

This poem captured me as an undergrad, and as I mentioned in the introductory post on this blog, it remains a go-to standard for me to this day. I have it memorized. At first I just thought it was funny, and I figure most teens or twenty-somethings can relate to the comic invocation of boredom. The presence of Henry’s mother carping at him, and his smart-alec response, appealed to my newly post-adolescent sensibility as well. What has kept me interested technically is the repetition of “bored” and “boring” and “bores”, seven times to be exact, along with “a drag” thrown in for variety, and the dismissive, push-away hand-wave and eye-roll you can’t miss with “the mountains or sea or sky”. There are other repetitions, “literature”, “flash & yearn”, “people(s)”, “Inner Resources” (capitalized, which is funny). Here’s a poem I wrote way back in ’97 and published in ISLE, only the second thing I ever published. It has nothing in common thematically with 14 at all, but the repetition of “green” was in my mind all the way and grew straight out of my familiarity with 14 and “bores”, which sort of afforded me the permission:

              Burial Mound

Where the path loops around that sycamore,

near the soggy creek that feeds the river,
you might find it if you don't look
too hard. Damp leaves of fringed phacelia and water-
leaf wash over a vague mound, green waves that lap
against the hump of a dreaming whale. Damselflies
tremble black and green through the humid air.
In the office up the hill an archeologist
says a woman lies buried here, bones on a bed
of flagstones. He uncovered her himself and left
her undisturbed: a necklace of drilled shells
around her neck, fish-bone needles,
a stone awl, beads, a green copper
pendant in a pouch by her right hand. 

But for some fat raindrops that slap the dark

greenery around, it's as quiet here now
as that pause when you let slip a secret you've cherished,
and your friend's eyes—her humid green
eyes—open in wonder and she peers
into the bare center of your only face,
saying, I had no clue. What will you do?
You shrug and know the thing you will do is re-cover
that little mystery with the dark loam
of the forest floor. Nettles and jewelweed
will fill the hollow, and the roots of box elders
will fix it under the leaves and humus,
and the secret flesh inside will fade and molder
alone, leaching out to the black, dank earth
that feeds this lush growth of inscrutable trees.

So, artful repetition is something I absorbed through 14. But I’m most attuned now to the way the poem effaces the speaker. Life, the tranquil hills, we’re told by our mothers and endless other droning authorities who repeat the same goddam platitudes over and over, is filled with peace and beauty and wonders, yadda, yadda. Screw that and your Inner Resources. Tell me that, he’s saying, and I’ll tell you how bored I am with it all. Henry, middle-aged adult, is reverting to simple adolescent rebellion in this movement. His being bored is one thing, his being told not to admit he’s bored bores him and makes his boredom worse, and this pushes him backward past adolescence toward diminishment. The full effacement comes to fruition in that odd last stanza. A dog has gone off into all that (boring) damn natural wonderment Wordsworth and his happy ilk do so go on about, and the speaker is reduced by it at the end to mere physiology—heart pumping (ho hum), brain churning (big deal), wag. In the end, what really bores Henry is not the world. He’s bored with himself, but more than that, he’s bored with his boredom. That’s the real problem.

The French poet, Baudelaire, took on the more sophisticated but related concept of “ennui” in Les Fleurs du Mal—The Flowers of Evil. Ennui becomes a symbol for a kind of Modernist damnation. Wordsworth, in his day, was already worried about the effect industrialism was having on the human spirit, which is partly why he and the other Romantics were compelled to write against it, asserting most fervently how his heart fills with pleasure at the memory of a field of daffodils. In other poems, like “Resolution and Independence,” he questions that approach. “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” Baudelaire sixty, seventy years later takes that same despondency and madness and runs with it. Hardly in wondrous tune with all the wondrous wonders anymore, he’s left bored, bored with himself, filled with ennui over the world and the condition of the world, and his boredom with his boredom, his ennui with his own ennui—his Modernist rejection of the spiritual wealth of the world—spirals in on itself and leads into a metaphoric damnation. The thing about Baudelaire’s persona is if he’s damned, then by God he’s damned proudly. Henry, like his contemporary, The Incredible Shrinking Man, just diminishes until he's gone: Wag. (But I still think the poem’s funny.)