#224 Eighty

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_224_Lonely_in_his_great_age_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

This is an elegy for T.S. Eliot, who died in 1965. It is set during Eliot’s funeral service in the Abbey (Westminster Abbey), where Eliot has a plaque set in the floor dedicated to him in Poet’s Corner. Ezra Pound is in attendance—aged 80, white-haired, ill, leaning hard on his cane. In their youth, Pound and Eliot were the two of the foundational spirits of high modernism. Pound got in trouble with his Fascist leanings, though, and was tried for treason in the US in 1946 and acquitted. But he was declared mentally ill and was institutionalized for the next 12 years. When he was released he moved to Italy and stayed there a recluse until he died in 1972. So not a happy unfolding for Pound’s later life, but as B. notes, there once had been budding youth and wine-meetings and picnics on the green grass, and tennis. This is what really drives this poem: It’s not at all about Eliot. It’s reminiscing about Eliot and Pound in their youth, and about wondering what happened to that youth and the source of all its incredible accomplishment. Why time? Remember when we were all young? What happened? How could things have come to this, doddering, insane, bodies crumbling? What happened? It doesn’t seem that far away and yet—look at us! White is the hue of death, B. says.

But also of victory. There’s a line from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, spoken by the Hemingway character: “Writing is competitive.” Well—writing isn’t necessarily competitive—anybody can write if he wants to, but a Career in Writing is competitive: the publishing business, competing and scrambling for space and attention and money and influence. It helps for a writer to remember that, apparently. Pound and Eliot were victorious in this game, so that also means something at the funeral, ennobles the whiteness of all the complex other sadnesses that white also stands for. Sartre declined his Nobel Prize because he declared the notion of a literary competition absurd, but perhaps this was just another competitive move, helping to further the existentialist philosophy that brought him all that attention in the first place. Well, it took a line from an unabashedly nostalgic and silly (but wonderful) movie to finally drive the reality of literary competition home to me, but now that I see it, I realize it has been there all along. The winners knew what they were doing, and they’ll let you know it too if you can listen. White the color of “victory” indeed. All right, so be it.

As for death and age, there is nothing new about that in The Dream Songs. This kind of thing might seem to be going on too long, but I just have to remember that B. was so good at writing poems in this form he invented that he could crank them out quickly, and they’re coming clustered out of the moment when this was often what he thought about. These are the thoughts that often arise when you get older, even when you’re relatively young. I get that. You remember this girl, that party, this game, that moment of early success, and you think: White? I’ve turned white? My hair has turned white? What just happened? How could this have happened? I think about it sometimes—I remember this girl, that party, this particular fish or frog or butterfly I caught, this innocuous moment laughing with my roommates. As much as my youthful pleasures and hard-working, brilliant youthful successes, I have even more ignominious youthful failures to look back on. But that’s pretty standard too. A word about a line: “Where the smother clusters pinpoint insights clear.” It’s initially tempting to read “pinpoint” as the verb, but no, the verb is “clusters” and “pinpoint” is an adjective modifying “insights”, the direct object: The smother is time and the retrospective sadness of age, which clusters the pinpoint insights of our sharpened, awake moments of youthful breakthrough. Their broader meaning becomes clear over time: They are “smothered clear” over time. It’s a brilliant evocative line, though a difficult and tricky line to clear up. It’s actually the key line in this whole poem

I look at old movies and think, Katherine Hepburn was so beautiful when she was 32. That scene in The Philadelphia Story (1940) when she’s drunk and flirting with Jimmy Stewart is understated and so wonderfully seductive and erotic. Sharp, sparkling, young, and brilliant. Cary Grant got the girl in the end but Jimmy Stewart got the great scene. 1940. She had a whole string of brilliant moments. What happened? The Romans came to Britain and exterminated the Druids and relegated their actual presence and influence to mythic mystery. How could that have happened? Dinosaurs trundled around right here, 100 million years ago, in all their massive savage innocence, and they’re gone. How can that even be? We’re here as one sparking dit-dah in the great Morse code tome of history, the plot still unfolding, still a mystery.