#36

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_36_The_high_ones_die_die_They_die_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

(Dedicated to the poet, William Meredith.)

William Faulkner had just died (1962), Ernest Hemingway had ended his life the year before, and Frost was dying (he would pass away very soon after this poem was written), so B. is lamenting that the “high ones” were passing on. What does it all mean, anyway? “What if I / roiling & babbling & braining, brood on why and / just sat on the fence?” I think a lot of us probably ask that kind of question: All that work we did? Accomplish much? Well, it doesn’t have to if you’re not too ambitious about it. Just do your thing, do your part, love along the way, and don’t worry about it. It’s all good and you’ll go to heaven. For others? They’re out to change the world, and nobody listens. George Bernard Shaw lamented that he had it all figured out. He gave us the answers. Nobody listened to him. Thus, he, and B., and the others—ineffectual scribblers. Insane, greasy longhairs with holes in their knees and their sleeves, in the park furiously preaching to the pigeons.

Mr. Bones’s minstrel conscience, generally trying to keep things on an even keel, tries to buck him up for a change in the face of B./Henry’s anguish. But B.’s work was “fool’s gold.” When Ike meets up for the first time with the legendary bear in Faulkner’s novella, The Bear, the animal sizes him up, sees he’s just a kid, and makes his getaway through the one spot he knew the kid couldn’t hold down. That’s what death does, and what it did to Faulkner. In Hemingway’s stories, it takes a good portion of that famous Hemingway machismo to help a bullfighter face a pissed-off and tormented bull in the ring, and more than one of Hemingway’s characters rises manfully to the challenge and gets gored anyway. Death ran a long horn through Hemingway’s groin and tossed him over. It’s fool’s gold to think you can overcome this inevitable sizing up and goring by the beast death that will throw you over too. According to B.: “But I go in for that.” Yeah, he gets it. This one’s a battle you don’t get to win. It’s the hunt and the fight that matters. If it’s results you’re after, you can look forward to winding up an ineffectual and silly-scribbling dilettante. Always.

Look, it’s a pretty macho way of looking at life and a literary career. Some people will prefer yesterday’s dancing as a more apt metaphor, and better for them. Me too. Others, when pushed, fall back on this culturally salient, violent trope. I’d like to say I’m sick of it. Blog on.