John Berryman: Collected Poems: 1937-1971
417
John Berryman: Collected Poems: 1937-1971
417eBookFirst Edition (First Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466879584 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 03/26/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 417 |
| File size: | 674 KB |
About the Author
John Berryman was born in Oklahoma in 1914. The author of several volumes of poetry, of which The Dream Songs is considered his masterwork, he died, a suicide, in 1972.
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John Berryman: Collected Poems, 1937â"1971
By John Berryman, Charles Thornbury
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 1989 Kate Donahue BerrymanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7958-4
CHAPTER 1
Winter Landscape
The three men coming down the winter hill
In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds
At heel, through the arrangement of the trees,
Past the five figures at the burning straw,
Returning cold and silent to their town,
Returning to the drifted snow, the rink
Lively with children, to the older men,
The long companions they can never reach,
The blue light, men with ladders, by the church
The sledge and shadow in the twilit street,
Are not aware that in the sandy time
To come, the evil waste of history
Outstretched, they will be seen upon the brow
Of that same hill: when all their company
Will have been irrecoverably lost,
These men, this particular three in brown
Witnessed by birds will keep the scene and say
By their configuration with the trees,
The small bridge, the red houses and the fire,
What place, what time, what morning occasion
Sent them into the wood, a pack of hounds
At heel and the tall poles upon their shoulders,
Thence to return as now we see them and
Ankle-deep in snow down the winter hill
Descend, while three birds watch and the fourth flies.
The Statue
The statue, tolerant through years of weather,
Spares the untidy Sunday throng its look,
Spares shopgirls knowledge of the fatal pallor
Under their evening colour,
Spares homosexuals, the crippled, the alone,
Extravagant perception of their failure;
Looks only, cynical, across them all
To the delightful Avenue and its lights.
Where I sit, near the entrance to the Park,
The charming dangerous entrance to their need,
Dozens, a hundred men have lain till morning
And the preservative darkness waning,
Waking to want, to the day before, desire
For the ultimate good, Respect, to hunger waking;
Like the statue ruined but without its eyes;
Turned vaguely out at dawn for a new day.
Fountains I hear behind me on the left,
See green, see natural life springing in May
To spend its summer sheltering our lovers,
Those walks so shortly to be over.
The sound of water cannot startle them
Although their happiness runs out like water,
Of too much sweetness the expected drain.
They trust their Spring; they have not seen the statue.
Disfigurement is general. Nevertheless
Winters have not been able to alter its pride,
If that expression is a pride remaining,
Coriolanus and Rome burning,
An aristocracy that moves no more.
Scholars can stay their pity; from the ceiling
Watch blasted and superb inhabitants,
The wreck and justifying ruined stare.
Since graduating from its years of flesh
The name has faded in the public mind
Or doubled: which is this? the elder? younger?
The statesman or the traveller?
Who first died or who edited his works,
The lonely brother bound to remain longer
By a quarter-century than the first-born
Of that illustrious and lost family?
The lovers pass. Not one of them can know
Or care which Humboldt is immortalized.
If they glance up, they glance in passing,
An idle outcome of that pacing
That never stops, and proves them animal;
These thighs breasts pointed eyes are not their choosing,
But blind insignia by which are known
Season, excitement, loosed upon this city.
Turning: the brilliant Avenue, red, green,
The laws of passage; marvellous hotels;
Beyond, the dark apartment where one summer
Night an insignificant dreamer,
Defeated occupant, will close his eyes
Mercifully on the expensive drama
Wherein he wasted so much skill, such faith,
And salvaged less than the intolerable statue.
The Disciple
Summoned from offices and homes, we came.
By candle-light we heard him sing;
We saw him with a delicate length of string
Hide coins and bring a paper through a flame;
I was amazed by what that man could do.
And later on, in broad daylight,
He made someone sit suddenly upright
Who had lain long dead and whose face was blue.
But most he would astonish us with talk.
The warm sad cadence of his voice,
His compassion, and our terror of his choice,
Brought each of us both glad and mad to walk
Beside him in the hills after sundown.
He spoke of birds, of children, long
And rubbing tribulation without song
For the indigent and crippled of this town.
Ventriloquist and strolling mage, from us,
Respectable citizens, he took
The hearts and swashed them in an upland brook,
Calling them his, all men's, anonymous.
.. He gained a certain notoriety;
The magical outcome of such love
The State saw it could not at all approve
And sought to learn where when that man would be.
The people he had entertained stood by,
I was among them, but one whom
He harboured kissed him for the coppers' doom,
Repenting later most most bitterly.
They ran him down and drove him up the hill.
He who had lifted but hearts stood
With thieves, performing still what tricks he could
For men to come, rapt in compassion still.
Great nonsense has been spoken of that time.
But I can tell you I saw then
A terrible darkness on the face of men,
His last astonishment; and now that I'm
Old I behold it as a young man yet.
None of us now knows what it means,
But to this day our loves and disciplines
Worry themselves there. We do not forget.
A Point of Age
I
At twenty-five a man is on his way.
The desolate childhood smokes on the dead hill,
My adolescent brothels are shut down
For industry has moved out of that town;
Only the time-dishonoured beggars and
The flat policemen, victims, I see still.
Twenty-five is a time to move away.
The travelling hands upon the tower call,
The clock-face telescopes a long desire:
Out of the city as the autos stream
I watch, I whisper, Is it time .. time?
Fog is enveloping the bridges, lodgers
Shoulder and fist each other in the mire
Where later, leaves, untidy lives will fall.
Companions, travellers, by luck, by fault
Whose none can ever decide, friends I had
Have frozen back or slipt ahead or let
Landscape juggle their destinations, slut
Solace and drink drown the degraded eye.
The fog is settling and the night falls, sad,
Across the forward shadows where friends halt.
Images are the mind's life, and they change.
How to arrange it — what can one afford
When ghosts and goods tether the twitching will
Where it has stood content and would stand still
If time's map bore the brat of time intact?
Odysseys I examine, bed on a board,
Heartbreak familiar as the heart is strange.
In the city of the stranger I discovered
Strike and corruption: cars reared on the bench
To horn their justice at the citizen's head
And hallow the citizen deaf, half-dead.
The quiet man from his own window saw
Insane wind take the ash, his favourite branch
Wrench, crack; the hawk came down, the raven hovered.
Slow spent stars wheel and dwindle where I fell.
Physicians are a constellation where
The blown brain sits a fascist to the heart.
Late, it is late, and it is time to start.
Sanction the civic woe, deal with your dear,
Convince the stranger: none of us is well.
We must travel in the direction of our fear.
II
By what weird ways, Mather and Boone, we came.
Ethan Allen, father, in the rebel wood
Teach trust and disobedience to the son
Who neither obeys nor can disobey One
No longer, down the reaches of his longing, known.
Speak from the forest and declare my blood
Dishonour, a trick a mockery my name.
You, Shaver, other shade, rébel again,
Great-grandfather, attest my hopeless need
Amongst the chromium luxury of the age
Uncomfortable, threadbare, apt to rage.
Recall your office, exile; tell me now
To devour the annals of the valuable dead,
Fish for the cortex, candour for my pain.
Horizons perish from a hacking eye! ..
The Hero, haggard on the top of time,
Enacts his inconceivable woe and pride
Plunging his enemies down the mountainside,
Lesson and master. We are come to learn
Compassion from the last and piercing scream
Of who was lifted before he could die.
Animal-and-Hero, where you lounge the air
Is the air of summer, smooth and masculine
As skin over a muscle; but the day
Darkens, and it is time to move away.
Old friends unbolt the night wherein you roam;
Wind rises, lightning, rain beats, you begin
The climb the conflict that are your desire.
In storm and gloom, before it is too late
I make my testament. I bequeath my heart
To the disillusioned few who have wished me well;
My vision I leave to one who has the will
To master it, and the consuming art;
What else — the sorrow, the disease, the hate —
I scatter; and I am prepared to start.
III
What is the age of naked man? His time
Scrawls the engrossing tumult on green mould
In a cellar and disreputable place.
Consternation and Hope war in his face.
Writhing upon his bed who achieves sleep
Who is alone? Man in the cradle, old,
Rocks on the fiery earth, smoke is his fame.
Prophecy is another smoke, and lost.
To say that country, time to come, will be
The island or harbour city of our choice
Argues the sick will raving in the voice.
The pythoness is mute upon her bier,
Cassandra took a thrust she would not see
And dropt for daughter an inarticulate ghost.
The animal within the animal
How shall we satisfy? With toys its fear,
With incantation its adorable trust?
Shall we say 'We were once and we shall be dust'
Or nourish it with confident lies and look
Contentment? What can the animal bear?
Whose version brightens that will not appal?
Watch in the valleys for the sign of snow.
Watch the light. Where the riotous leaves lay
Will arise a winter man at the New Year
And speak. No eye will be dry, none shall fear.
— That time is not yet, and our eyes are now:
Twenty-five is a time to move away.
Late on the perilous wood the son flies low.
The projection of the tower on the pine
Wavers. The wind will fan and force the fire
Streaming across our ditches to find wood.
All that someone has wished or understood
Is fuel to the holocaust he lives;
It spreads, it is the famine of his desire,
The tongue teeth eyes of your will and of mine.
What then to praise, what love, what look to have?
The animals who lightless live, alone
And dark die. We await the rising moon.
When the moon lifts, lagging winter moon,
Its white face over time where the sun shone
Gold once, we have a work to do, a grave
At last for the honourable and exhausted man.
Detroit, 1940
The Traveller
They pointed me out on the highway, and they said
'That man has a curious way of holding his head.'
They pointed me out on the beach; they said 'That man
Will never become as we are, try as he can.'
They pointed me out at the station, and the guard
Looked at me twice, thrice, thoughtfully & hard.
I took the same train that the others took,
To the same place. Were it not for that look
And those words, we were all of us the same.
I studied merely maps. I tried to name
The effects of motion on the travellers,
I watched the couple I could see, the curse
And blessings of that couple, their destination,
The deception practised on them at the station,
Their courage. When the train stopped and they knew
The end of their journey, I descended too.
The Ball Poem
What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over — there it is in the water!
No use to say 'O there are other balls':
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbour where
His ball went. I would not intrude on him,
A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now
He senses first responsibility
In a world of possessions. People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up
And gradually light returns to the street,
A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour .. I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from John Berryman: Collected Poems, 1937â"1971 by John Berryman, Charles Thornbury. Copyright © 1989 Kate Donahue Berryman. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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