#94

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_94_Ill_lay_he_long_upon_this_last_return_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

A “makar” is a Scottish word for a poet or bard. It’s tempting enough sometimes to get down on Henry for being a putz, especially since his illness is of the substance-abuse and self-abuse variety, which opens the door to blaming the patient for his troubles. Not going there today and shouldn’t ever, really. Alcohol abuse is a bona fide disease, as I recall, and one of the toughest of all substance abuse conditions to break free of. So, give the guy a break today. Looks like a couple of memories of women he knew from back when are kicking around as well, but you know—seems understandable today. That mode of experience does provide for some vivid memories, and in such a strength-diminished, hospitalized state, they would be a comfort. He’s alone but for the nurses anyway, who treat him with smiles of professional aloof. I heard a travel writer on the radio today claiming that the actual experience of visiting a new place is merely the beginning. It’s when we recollect our experiences in moments of retrospective stillness and do the work it takes to reconcile our travels with our day to day lives, that’s when travel really becomes valuable. Sex isn't that different. This takes me straight to Wordsworth, who maintained in his preface to Lyrical Ballads that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” All the ingredients are present in DS 94: Strong feelings of sadness, loneliness, despair, coupled with recollections of past high emotional experiences overflowing, into the poem. Whether a hospital is a place of tranquility will depend on the state of one’s physical and emotional health. There is isolation, for sure, and stillness.

 “A hospital is where it all has a use, / so is a makar.” So: a hospital takes ones illness and weakness, and more than that, one’s life and being, and makes of them the substance through which its creative energies are expressed? Thus, hospital as the creative “makar”? Refashioning the illness and wounds of the patient into new creations of health? I think so. Then there is God, “substantial” God, tuning in from abroad, or far away, having been called by the suffering of the speaker. This poem is a cri de coeur from a very bad place. I remember being sick. I’ve had pancreatitis about 40 times in my life, the pain of which I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Trust me. It put me in the hospital on a dozen occasions. Such an experience does tend to motivate a prayerful orientation. (The docs and me, we’ve figured out the problem, and beat it, and I’m grateful for that.) But there were moments when relief was so far away, and the now was excruciating enough, that it wasn’t just pain any more. It was something beyond that. I stopped and looked at myself and said, What is this? What do we do now? No easy answer to that. You call on the doctors and nurses to help, and they do, and in B.’s case, God was another where to turn. And he grew aware, it seems.