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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Editor’s Note
Abbreviations
Introduction
Chronology
THE DISPOSSESSED [1948]
I
Winter Landscape
The Statue
The Disciple
A Point of Age
The Traveller
The Ball Poem
Fare Well
II
The Spinning Heart
On the London Train
Caravan
The Possessed
Parting as Descent
Cloud and Flame
Letter to His Brother
Desires of Men and Women
World-Telegram
Conversation
Ancestor
World’s Fair
Travelling South
At Chinese Checkers
The Animal Trainer (1)
The Animal Trainer (2)
III
1 September 1939
Desire Is a World by Night
Farewell to Miles
The Moon and the Night and the Men
White Feather
The Enemies of the Angels
A Poem for Bhain
Boston Common
IV
Canto Amor
The Nervous Songs
Young Woman’s Song
The Song of the Demented Priest
The Song of the Young Hawaiian
A Professor’s Song
The Captain’s Song
The Song of the Tortured Girl
The Song of the Bridegroom
Song of the Man Forsaken and Obsessed
The Pacifist’s Song
Surviving Love
The Lightning
V
Rock-Study with Wanderer
Whether There Is Sorrow in the Demons
The Long Home
A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away
New Year’s Eve
Narcissus Moving
The Dispossessed
SONNETS TO CHRIS [1947, 1966]
1. “I wished, all the mild days of middle March”
2. “Your shining—where?—rays my wide room with gold”
3. “Who for those ages ever without some blood”
4. “Ah when you drift hover before you kiss”
5. “The poet hunched, so, whom the worlds admire”
6. “Rackman and victim twist: sounds all these weeks”
7. “I’ve found out why, that day, that suicide”
8. “College of cocktails, a few gentlemen”
9. “Great citadels whereon the gold sun falls”
10. “You in your stone home where the sycamore”
11. “I expect you from the North. The path winds in”
12. “Mutinous in the half-light, & malignant, grind”
13. “I lift—lift you five States away your glass”
14. “Moths white as ghosts among these hundreds cling”
15. “What was Ashore, then? . . Cargoed with Forget”
16. “Thrice, or I moved to sack, I saw you: how”
17. “The Old Boys’ blazers like a Mardi-Gras”
18. “You, Chris, contrite I never thought to see”
19. “You sailed in sky-high, with your speech askew”
20. “Presidential flags! and the General is here”
21. “Whom undone David upto the dire van sent”
22. “If not white shorts—then in a princess gown”
23. “They may, because I would not cloy your ear—”
24. “Still it pleads and rankles: ‘Why do you love me?’”
25. “Sometimes the night echoes to prideless wailing”
26. “Crouched on a ridge sloping to where you pour”
27. “In a poem made by Cummings, long since, his”
28. “A wasp skims nearby up the bright warm air”
30. “Of all that weeks-long day, though call it back”
31. “Troubling are masks . . the faces of friends, my face”
32. “How shall I sing, western & dry & thin”
33. “Audacities and fêtes of the drunken weeks!”
34. “‘I couldn’t leave you’ you confessed next day.”
35. “Nothing there? nothing up the sky alive”
36. “Keep your eyes open when you kiss: do: when”
37. “Sigh as it ends . . I keep an eye on your”
38. “Musculatures and skulls. Later some throng”
39. “And does the old wound shudder open? Shall”
40. “Marble nor monuments whereof then we spoke”
41. “And Plough-month peters out . . its thermal power”
42. “The clots of age, grovel and palsy, crave”
43. “You should be gone in winter, that Nature mourn”
44. “Bell to sore knees vestigial crowds, let crush”
45. “Boy twenty-one, in Donne, shied like a blow”
46. “Are we? You murmur ‘not’. What of the night-”
47. “How far upon these songs with my strict wrist”
48. “I’ve met your friend at last, your violent friend”
49. “One note, a daisy, and a photograph”
50. “They come too thick, hail-hard, and all beside”
51. “A tongue there is wags, down in the dark wood O”
52. “A sullen brook hardly would satisfy”
53. “Some sketch sweat’ out, unwilling swift & crude”
54. “It was the sky all day I grew to and saw.”
55. “When I recall I could believe you’d go”
56. “Sunderings and luxations, luxe, and grief-”
57. “Our love conducted as in tropic rain”
58. “Sensible, coarse, and moral; in decent brown”
59. “Loves are the summer’s. Summer like a bee”
60. “Today is it? Is it today? I shudder”
61. “Languid the songs I wish I willed . . I try . .”
62. “Tyranny of your car—so far resembles”
63. “Here too you came and sat a time once, drinking.”
64. “The dew is drying fast, a last drop glistens”
65. “Once when they found me, some refrain ‘Quoi faire?’”
66. “Astronomies and slangs to find you, dear”
67. “Faith like the warrior ant swarming, enslaving”
68. “Where the lane from the highway swerves the first drops fell”
69. “For you am I collared to quit my dear”
70. “October’s both, back in the Sooner State”
71. “Our Sunday morning when dawn-priests were applying”
72. “A Cambridge friend put in,—one whom I used”
73. “Demand me again what Kafka’s riddles mean”
74. “All I did wrong, all the Grand Guignol years”
75. “Swarthy when young; who took the tonsure; sign”
76. “The two plantations Greatgrandmother brought”
77. “Fall and rise of her midriff bells. I watch.”
78. “On the wheat-sacks sullen with the ceaseless damp”
79. “I dreamt he drove me back to the asylum”
80. “Infallible symbolist!—Tanker driven ashore”
81. “Four oval shadows, paired, ringed
each by sun”
82. “Why can’t, Chris, why shouldn’t they fall in love?”
83. “Impossible to speak to her, and worse”
84. “How shall I do, to pass the weary time”
85. “Spendthrift Urethra—Sphincter, frugal one”
86. “Our lives before hopelessly our mistake!”
87. “Is it possible, poor kids, you must not come out?”
88. “Anomalous I linger, and ignore”
89. “‘If long enough I sit here, she, she’ll pass.’”
90. “For you an idyl, was it not, so far”
91. “Itself a lightning-flash ripping the ‘dark”
92. “What can to you this music wakes my years”
93. “The man who made her let me climb the derrick”
94. “Most strange, my change, this nervous interim.—”
95. “‘Old Smoky’ when you sing with Robin, Chris”
96. “It will seem strange, no more this range on range”
97. “I say I laid siege—you enchanted me . .”
98. “Mallarmé siren upside down,—rootedly!”
99. “A murmuration of the shallow, Crane”
100. “I am interested alone in making ready”
101. “Because I’d seen you not believe your lover”
102. “A penny, pity, for the runaway ass!”
103. “A ‘broken heart’ . . but can a heart break, now?”
104. “A spot of poontang on a five-foot piece”
105. “Three, almost, now into the ass’s years”
106. “Began with swirling, blind, unstilled oh still”
107. “Darling I wait O in my upstairs box”
108. “I owe you, do I not, a roofer: though”
109. “Ménage à trois, like Tristan’s,—difficult! . .”
110. “‘Ring us up when you want to see us …’—‘Sure’”
111. “Christian to Try: ‘I am so coxed in it’”
112. “I break my pace now for a sonic boom”
113. “‘I didn’t see anyone else, I just saw Lies’”
114. “You come blonde visiting through the black air”
115. “As usual I’m up before the sun”
116. “Outlaws claw mostly to a riddled end”
117. “All we were going strong last night this time”
HOMAGE TO MISTRESS BRADSTREET [1953]
from HIS THOUGHT MADE POCKETS & THE PLANE BUCKT [1958]
Venice, 182-
Scots Poem
The Mysteries
The Poet’s Final Instructions
from The Black Book (i)
from The Black Book (ii)
from The Black Book (iii)
A Sympathy, A Welcome
Not to Live
American Lights, Seen From Off Abroad
Note to Wang Wei
Formal Elegy [1964]
LOVE & FAME [1971]
I
Her & It
Cadenza on Garnette
Shirley & Auden
Freshman Blues
Images of Elspeth
My Special Fate
Drunks
Down & Back
Two Organs
Olympus
Nowhere
In & Out
The Heroes
Crisis
Recovery
II
Away
First Night at Sea
London
The Other Cambridge
Friendless
Monkhood
Views of Myself
Transit
Meeting
Tea
III
The Search
Message
Relations
Antitheses
Have a Genuine American Horror-&-Mist on the Rocks
To a Woman
A Huddle of Need
Damned
Of Suicide
Dante’s Tomb
Despair
The Hell Poem
Death Ballad
‘I Know’
Purgatory
Heaven
The Home Ballad
IV
Eleven Addresses to the Lord
1. “Master of beauty”
2. “Holy, as I suppose”
3. “Sole watchman”
4. “If I say Thy name”
5. “Holy, & holy”
6. “Under new management”
7. “After a Stoic”
8. A Prayer for the Self
9. “Surprise me”
10. “Fearful I peer”
11. “Germanicus leapt”
DELUSIONS etc of John Berryman [1972]
I. OPUS DEI
Lauds
Matins
Prime
Interstitial Office
Terce
Sext
Nones
Vespers
Compline
II
Washington in Love
Beethoven Triumphant
Your Birthday in Wisconsin You Are
Drugs Alcohol Little Sister
In Memoriam (1914–1953)
III
Gislebertus’ Eve
Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion
Tampa Stomp
Old Man Goes South Again Alone
The Handshake, The Entrance
Lines to Mr Frost
He Resigns
No
The Form
Ecce Homo
A Prayer After All
Back
Hello
IV. SCHERZO
Navajo Setting the Record Straight
Henry By Night
Henry’s Understanding
Defensio in Extremis
Damn You, Jim D., You Woke Me Up
V
Somber Prayer
Unknowable? perhaps not altogether
Minnesota Thanksgiving
A Usual Prayer
Overseas Prayer
Amos
Certainty Before Lunch
The Prayer of the Middle-Aged Man
‘How Do You Do, Dr Berryman, Sir?’
The Facts & Issues
King David Dances
EARLY POEMS
from “TWENTY POEMS” in FIVE YOUNG AMERICAN POETS [1940]
Song from “Cleopatra”
The Apparition
Meditation
Sanctuary
The Trial
Night and the City
Nineteen Thirty-Eight
The Curse
Ceremony and Vision
from POEMS [1942]
The Dangerous Year
River Rouge, 1932
Communist
Thanksgiving: Detroit
Epilogue
APPENDICES
Berryman’s Published Prefaces, Notes, and Dedications
Editor’s Notes, Guidelines, and Procedures
Copy-Texts and Variants
Acknowledgments
Index of Titles and First Lines
Copyright
Editor’s Note
Collected Poems 1937–1971 brings together for the first time John Berryman’s seven collections of short poems. This new edition incorporates only the collections he published and includes as well Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, one of his two long poems. The inclusive dates, 1937 to 1971, correspond to the dates of composition of the earliest and latest poems rather than the dates of the publication of his collections. Henry’s Fate and Other Poems (1976) is not collected here because Berryman himself did not select and arrange the volume; The Dream Songs (1969), a self-contained major work, will continue to be published as a separate volume.
As editor of Collected Poems 1937–1971, my job was determined by the kind of edition the publisher requested—one that was general rather than exclusively scholarly. The complete history of the changes and transmissions of each collection and poem, for example, was not to
be documented. Nevertheless, since my duty was to present an accurate text—believing the general reader is as interested in having an accurate text as the scholarly one—it was agreed that I would document all instances where I chose a reading different from that of the published first or revised edition of each collection.
The Editor’s Notes, Guidelines, and Procedures, and the Copy-Texts and Variants trace the historical embodiments of Berryman’s published texts and describe the nature of the textual problems his manuscripts, corrected galleys, and page proofs present. The Copy-Texts and Variants notes, less interpretive than factual, show how the texts for Collected Poems were established. My Introduction is addressed to both new and experienced readers of Berryman’s poetry. It is arranged in nine parts: the first five present an overview of major themes in Berryman’s life and work; the last four inquire into his poetics.
Abbreviations
WORKS BY BERRYMAN
20P
“Twenty Poems” in Five Young American Poets
Poems
Poems
TD
The Dispossessed
Sonnets
Sonnets to Chris
Homage
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
HomageAOP
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and Other Poems
Thoughts
His Thought Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt
L&F
Love & Fame
De
Delusions etc of John Berryman
CP
Collected Poems 1937–1971
PUBLISHERS AND MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS
FF
Faber and Faber, Ltd. (London, England)
FSG
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York City)
JBP
John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota Libraries
OTHER ABBREVIATIONS
CTS
Carbon typescript
HW
Handwritten
MS
Manuscript
TS
Ribbon typescript
Introduction
Wary readers of John Berryman’s poetry, the kind he respected most because they ask hard questions, find themselves in the best company. Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell in 1956 that she “couldn’t make up” her mind about the merits of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Eleven years later, she was no less baffled by Berryman’s Sonnets when she wrote to Lowell: “I have been struggling with those sonnets—many beautiful lines but I do find him difficult.” Her bafflement, nevertheless, did not diminish her sense of the penetrating power of Berryman’s poetry: “One has the feeling a 100 years from now,” she wrote to Lowell in 1962, “that he may be all the rage—or a ‘discovery’—hasn’t one?” Three months after Berryman’s death, in January 1972, Lowell recalled his moments of uncertainty in hearing Berryman’s voice: