This begins Book V of The Dream Songs. It begins with a sort
of Ode to Ill Health. I’m pretty sure I detect another nod to Sylvia Plath’s
work, in this case, “Tulips”. Plath’s poem is about being and feeling small and
like nothing, in a hospital room. Then the tulips encroach, like eyes, like
little devouring mouths:
And
I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye
of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And
I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips
eat my oxygen.
Yikes. The poem describes that
feeling of helplessness that comes after surgery (she wrote the poem while in
the hospital for an appendectomy, which came right after a miscarriage). The
physical malaise of recovery ties into a pretty bleak emotional state as well,
so that the gift of tulips becomes this weighty, intrusive presence and a
constant reminder of ill health.
Before
they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going,
breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then
the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air
snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags
and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They
concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing
and resting without committing itself.
The walls, also,
seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips
should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening
like the mouth of some great African cat,
And
I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red
blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I
taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a
country far away as health.
I like that poem, although like
so much of Plath, it’s not very comforting. I had back spasms a couple weeks
ago, just from a small injury in the right spot (healed up already,
thankfully), so I’m still close to the universal experience of how pain drags
you down. Pain and illness are consequences of having a body, but knowledge
that one will heal or recover permits patience and acceptance. Once, after an
operation, and having been asleep all day, I knew I wouldn’t sleep that night.
I had the nurse turn out the lights, I couldn’t move, and I lay there in the
dark on my back all night, wide awake. I had been dreading it, but it actually ended
up peaceful and pleasant. Every bit like Plath’s resting without committing.
Nowhere to go, permission to plan or accomplish nothing, just lie quietly and
let the body do its repair work. For one night, it was a gift. It would get
old, and eventually maddening, if it were to go on very long, more than a
single night or two. The chronic illness that B. is wrestling with—self-inflicted
through substance abuse, but that doesn’t matter—and the chronic illness and
pain so many people are forced to endure makes for a different and tougher
situation. People overcome it, but it takes an effort of mind and spirit to
relegate the body’s signals to the background. Maybe I’m wrong and the way
forward is to accept and embrace the body’s suffering. I don’t know. For Berryman,
it’s a chronic emotional wound that prompts abuse of the whole person, body and
spirit. His intellect stays intact and is functioning at a high level, but
everything else seems sick or wounded.
This poem is so akin to Plath’s, and the references seem so clear, that I’m confident B. must have had “Tulips” in mind. It takes one step past where “Tulips” ends, though. For Plath, health is a distant, unreachable country. She’s nowhere near it. Here in DS 92, “Henry mars / this surface of an Earth or other”—he’s present in the neighborhood of the ideal Earth of health, but his presence on it is destructive of it. He doesn’t live there, either, he simply marches over it, almost certainly a forced march, crashing his way through and leaving poems behind like grotesque, muddy footprints over the walks and the meadows and the fine carpets.
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