The critic Dodson claims that the lines from DS 378 carry
over into DS 379, an enjambment that forms a 36-line poem (Berryman's Henry: Living at the Intersection of Need and Art, p.36).
It’s true that 378 doesn’t end with a period, and there is an easy transition
from one to the next:
The violent winds in my gardens
front & back
have driven away my birds
-----------------------------------------------------
To the edge of Europe, the
eighteenth edge,
But that makes the next line, “The ancient edge, Henry
sailed full of thought” so awkwardly placed that I tend to think not. More
importantly, the poems are really different. DS 378 takes on a modernist
philosophical agenda. It’s complex and compressed, whereas DS 379 is plainer, about
the Dream Song project, the form of the poems, and B.’s thoughts on it. Quite
different.
There’s a wistfulness about it overall, though it ends with
a flat realization that there will not be another such endeavor. He had traveled
to England and Ireland 30 years before, and that trip culminated in that
afternoon tea with Yeats, where young Berryman lit his cigarette. That, at
least, is incredibly romantic. B. is thinking back on his great project, nearly
complete now, and realizing that he’ll never have that moment again. It’s
amazing that he did, though. Out of that, somehow, came the “eighteenth edge”—these
18-line poems. He had had the verve to make up a style, and it worked. He made
it work. You only get one shot at your life. He was ambitious enough, and had
enough chutzpah, to track down the great poet, too. You look back on whoever
you were in your twenties, the time in one’s life where adulthood starts to
really kick in, and if the younger self did something that reverberated
meaningfully over the decades, the older self is grateful for it.
The Smoke of Thirty
Years
I remember the me that was him.
I forgive his ignorant blunders.
But he went to Paris and learned
To speak. He went to Paris,
And when he came home
He kept reading, layering a rich
Natural language on his shy canvas.
Under his painting’s calm impasto
The fervor of a dozen museums
Keeps the elastic oil glowing
Like embers under the ashy
Surface of a fine, mellow hashish.
KZ
I think this is a lovely DS. I'm finding myself trying to read each one in isolation, to give it a fair shake. "What if this was the only Berryman poem I'd ever read? What would I think?"
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