Sad Sack Henry’s expecting
something bad to happen every day gets silly after awhile, but that’s the point,
the cartoonishness of Henry’s character. Berryman the real person also
cultivated a sense of tragic comedy about his whole life, I think, but he was
not a cartoon. Maybe it’ll pay to be more sensitive to the difference from here
on. In this poem, like always, the slide from poet to character and back is
seamless, so it’s easy enough to mix them up. Henry speaks first, then the
second stanza abandons Henry for the poet, speaking directly. As for Henry
and/or B. as bumbling Sad Sack, other, more positive things have arisen in The Dream Songs lately, so B.’s not
inexorably portraying himself as a buffoon. Here, Henry’s confession, only hinted at, is that surprisingly his art has at
least partially redeemed him. It’s that he’s undergoing a “modesty” of death,
not a full one, a flirtation or engagement with it. It’s there at the end, too,
in “I saw nobody coming, so I went instead” which has a couple meanings. One is
that, no one is coming, especially the father he lost who is so directly and sadly
mentioned in the second stanza. The details are autobiographical. “Agone” is
not a misprint, it deliberately compresses several words together—gone, agony,
ago. But since his father is not coming, and never will, Henry will go to join
him. His art gets him part way as he lives his painful way through this
“handkerchief sandwich.” But there’s something else too. Who exactly is the
minstrel voice who speaks in a caricature Negro dialect and calls Henry “Mr.
Bones” is unknown, except that Berryman hinted, when the collection was all
written and published and over, that it might just be the voice of Death, that
figure whose influence he courted all his life. If this is so, then there’s a
pretty likely explanation for the dance in the third stanza:
I offers you this handkerchief,
now set
your left foot by my right foot, shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,
arm in arm, by the beautiful sea,
hum a little, Mr Bones.
Get ready, because here we go! We
don’t actually need a hint from beyond the books to see that the voice is Death
with whom Henry is being invited to dance. Death offers him a handkerchief, and
if life is a handkerchief sandwich, in other words bracketed by tears, then this is an offer of comfort but also a
symbol of the end. There is one more Dream Song in the collection, then Henry
indeed slides into an easeful death—again—and the first 14 of the next volume
are all titled “Opus Posthumous”—written from beyond, until, like Lazarus, he’s
back for more mayhem. But there is something of comfort in the melancholy of
this particular poem, a going home, a rest for a while. It’s the saddest Dream
Song yet, I think, and I think also that there’s something beautiful about this
one.
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