#21

Some good people, daring & subtle voices
and their tense faces, as I think of it
I see sank underground.
I see. My radar digs. I do not dig.
Cool their flushing blood, them eyes is shut—
eyes?

Appalled: by all the dead: Henry brooded.

Without exception! All.
ALL.
The senior population     waits. Come down! come down!
A ghastly & flashing pause, clothed,
life called; us do.

In a madhouse heard I an ancient man

tube-fed who had not said for fifteen years
(they said) one canny word,
senile forever, who a heart might pierce,
mutter, ‘O come on down. O come on down.’
Clear whom he meant.

This is how I read a Dream Song:

There are all these good people, often with voices both “daring & subtle”, and for whatever reason, they always end up eventually dying. They are “sank underground” here: Buried in a graveyard. “I see. My radar digs.” “My radar” I read simply as imagination, as in, I imagine them down there. “I do not dig.”: There’s a complex pun here on “dig”—literally digging in the dirt for the buried bodies, but also, in early 60s parlance, “dig” means simply to “like,” and it also means to “understand.” (Can you dig it?) So: “I do not dig”: I’m of course not literally digging them up to see them, (I only imagine them with my “radar”), but I also don’t like the thought of them down there, and furthermore, I don’t really understand why they’re there anyway. “Cool their flushing blood”—when bodies die, they go cool, and when they die their eyes shut. Except, in that last line, Henry realizes they have no eyes now either. Think of Hamlet with Yorick’s skull—“here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.” Dead flesh decays away, including the beautiful lips and the marvelous, miraculous eyes—and it’s an appalling thought if you find yourself dwelling on it. B. was a Shakespearean scholar before he ever started writing poetry, I believe, so it’s hard to even imagine that this image hasn’t grown directly from that scene in Hamlet, one of world literature’s great meditations on death and decay. Henry is finding himself appalled by the thought of the dead, and while that may seem odd, it’s actually not. We all do it, and we’ve all woken up at 4 AM and thought to ourselves, one day you [your name here] are going to die. It’s an appalling moment. Henry broods over it, and he is appalled by all of the dead around him. “Without exception! All. ALL.” This repetition is partly to make sure we don’t miss the point that Henry is brooding over the fact of death, aided by the exclamation point and the capitals, but more to the point, the repetition has a comic overstatement to it. B. is both snickering at Henry and totally sympathizing with him at the same time. And note the switch from “I” to “Henry”, from first to third person. This happens so seamlessly that we don’t even notice anymore, but whether the narrator is referring to himself, or Henry is talking, or something else, it all flickers in and out. We’re used to this by now.

The poem shifts to the “senior population” as the segment of us beginning to really face the fact of death, and the implication is unstated that kids through thirty-somethings don’t need to bother yet, outside of tragedy. The seniors do. The 4 spaces before “waits” is a nice, quick touch of visual accentuation, and of course the onset of death is the thing the seniors are waiting for. “Come down! Come down!”: On its own, especially in the context of meditations on death that the poem has already well established, we can reasonably surmise that God or Jesus is being addressed, since this is common in cultures worldwide to call to God up in heaven as a way of easing the unsettling and terrifying thought that as ego we will exist no longer, but there is something else there as well, a double meaning that is resonating with the more serious address to God. Game shows were well established on TV by the early sixties. “Come on down!” was a refrain in more than one of them, for audience members lucky enough to be called for a game in the spotlight in front of millions. The poem’s use of it has a kind of bitter overtone, that we trivialize death as another way of easing it. The poem then makes a quick switch to a characterization of life as “ghastly & flashing pause, clothed.” We’re born naked, and clothing means nothing to us dead, so the interval described as “clothed” works, but more interesting is the characterization of life as a “flashing pause.” It’s an instance of poetic compression that is really effective, and the four words together are a brilliant, sardonic commentary on all the potential, excitement and horror that life generally brings to us, yet it's muffled and covered by clothing, keeping things in balance. And there’s always that inference too that it’s also a big joke on us, a cosmic game show. But its being a “pause” is also very serious, with spiritual overtones: Our true life is with God in eternity, and we’re asked to take time out from that to engage in all this crazy life for a time, just a pause from what matters. “us do”: another quick example of babytalk or blackface patter, meaning something like “this is what we all encounter.”

In the third stanza, the poem lets up on all the typical fragmented Dream Song compression and lays out a straightforward story, easy to follow, about a dying, physically and mentally incapacitated patient, who at the moment of his death calls out “O come on down! O come on down!” I’m quite certain the reference to Let’s Make a Deal is deliberate (the game show premiered in 1963, a year or less before the poem was written), with the same double meaning as before, but the “O” in front of the refrain puts a plaintive spin on it now, and the call is less comic or contemptible, and much more serious, and actually quite moving. We may “game show” and commercialize our lives as much as want, but in the end something else will have the last say, and that something is very serious. The poem ends with saying as much: “Clear whom he meant”: God doesn’t need to be named here. We get the reference.

So in the end, the poem is very spiritual in character, with a commentary on death, what we do with our lives, and how we face the frightening fact of our death.

This is how I read a Dream Song.