#384

http://vegancinephile.com/2014/08/22/poem-of-the-week-dream-song-384-by-john-berryman-2/

Fairly unambiguous this, in its rage, a garish pronouncement: Tear open his father’s grave and axe him dead again, for good measure. There are several ways to read this poem. One way is likely how he would have had us read this, as the emotional explanation for all that has happened to him, that thing that sat down on Henry’s heart from the infamous DS 29, where Henry thanks his lucky stars that he hasn’t yet horribly murdered some woman and hacked her body to pieces, out of the depths of his anguish. Well, there is a major difference between being afraid of doing something and planning on doing it, give him that much. He wasn’t physically a violent person. He never actually visited his father’s grave, from what I gather, so the return pilgrimage in this poem is imaginary. Certainly he thought about it enough. Another way to read this poem, though, is as a great, passionate smokescreen—methinks the poet doth grieve too much. The scholarly opinion these days seems to be that at some level, both in his heart, but also liberated through psychotherapy, he knew that his father didn’t really shoot his own heart out. He was murdered externally. There is maybe, just maybe, one spot in the whole 385-poem cycle of the Dream Songs where B. lets slip that he knows this. But the pose of the emotional cripple this sets up was too valuable to let go of, too perfect an excuse for poor choices and bad behavior that followed in his adulthood, so he never let on. Lest we forget, he drives the point home in the penultimate Dream Song. Couldn’t afford to let on that things might have been otherwise. There was too much invested. And indeed, if it was a pose, it was a pose that carried him a long way, and got him everything he wanted. It even excuses the addiction. Well—that’s another reading. An uncharitable one, to be sure.

As I read this again, for the 10^th time or so since last night, contemplating what to say about it, it just now struck me that this DS 384 looks very much to me like Berryman’s answer to Sylvia Plath’s "Daddy." Not everyone loves Plath (though many more do than don’t), but there’s no doubt that she’s indispensable. Good luck getting through an undergraduate Intro. to Lit. class without encountering “Daddy” or “Lady Lazarus.” I’ve taught “Daddy” a dozen times myself. I generally try to nudge the class toward an understanding of the poem as a love poem to Plath’s father, an idea that I got from one of the Intro. to Lit. textbooks I used long, long ago. The “Daddy” she’s destroying isn’t the real one (of course—he’s already dead), it’s the image of him that she’s dispensing with, the reified or calcified collection of stereotypes in her memory that she breaks apart so that her memories can maintain the kind of spontaneous freshness that is characteristic of relationships with the living. It’s all she has, since he’s not among the living. It’s this one moment in a cycle of destruction and rebirth of the father’s memory that makes the poem so great and so heartbreaking, because it’s all necessitated by the fact that he’s dead and she needs him. But he’s not there. She still struggles with needing him. B. was in exactly the same boat, and there should be no doubt that his grief over the violent death, suicide or murder, of his father was terrible. He was just a boy. That will have to have a lasting effect, and here, he’s still trying to deal with it in the same way Plath tried to deal with her father’s death. It looks like anger. It’s not anger. It’s still grief, reverberating from a deep and terrible need based in love. This is all quite possible.

Sylvia Plath died in 1963, and this DS 384 was written somewhere around 1967 or 1968, so she had been gone only a few short years. Even though the world in 1968 was already immensely different from 1963, her reputation was on the rise. Knowing Berryman as well as I think I do now, I can’t see that he’d let pass the opportunity to ride this poet’s and this great poem’s coattails upward into the realms of literary immortality. It was too perfect an opportunity. I’ll see your “Daddy” and raise you “Dream Song 384”—don’t forget that literature was a competitive enterprise for this cat. In the end, this isn’t a charitable reading of the poem and its inspiration and purpose either. But I don’t put anything past him. He had a heavy streak of weaselry in him.

To me, it’s not a poem that invites a sympathetic response, even though I believe it was meant to bludgeon the reader into a high-sentimental empathy. Woe is me—is anyone watching?—Woe is me! Many, many readers have fallen for it if that’s so. What rescues the whole thing, though, is that image of the eleven year old boy finding his father dead outside of his window. It’s real, and it’s so sad that we’ll forgive anything after that. Almost anything. Doesn’t matter why it happened, it happened. If I voice doubt, accuse him as an adult of posing, of being a weasel, there’s something in me that just cries out to knock it off. Grief is grief, and there is something unseemly and harsh about ever judging it, even after forty years. So, I can bow to that and let it go.

In the end, I think, these various charitable or uncharitable readings don’t compete. They all hover around this poem and contribute to or detract from its validity. But that ambiguity raises the whole thing into a new level of validity! The whole Dream Songs project is about this ambiguity—does he or doesn’t he? Did he or didn’t he? Who was he really? Confessional my foot! But there is that sadness, in the end. That is constant, and what the poem finally leaves you with. If he built an existential house of cards out of the mistakes of his life, it’s that emotion that keeps the whole poetic structure glued together and has saved it so far from blowing away.