For an Excellent Lady
STEPANCHEV, STEPHEN
For an Excellent Lady berryman's sonnets By John Berryman Farrar, Straus and Giroux IIS pp. $4.95. Reviewed by stephen stepanchev Professor of English, Queens College Berryman s Sonnets is a...
...The octave (abbaabba) presents the circumstances that interest the poet: what Lise, the "you" character, has confessed and how the "I" character has reacted...
...Actually, the hyperbolic thousand years can be reduced to 20, for, on the basis of internal evidence, I would judge that the poems were written shortly after World War II and probably during the summer of 1946...
...Ah, to work underground Slowly and wholly in your vein profound...
...He is addicted to inversions of syntax, as in the sentence "You they saw not...
...The sestet (cdeedc) offers the analogy between the lover's passion and the Jew's certainty as to the existence of the Law in the Ark in the Temple at Jerusalem...
...It is the story of the near-mental-breakdown of a lover experiencing the pressure of conflicting impulses, from the moment he fixes his dream of beauty on Lise to the last furtive kiss in the kitchen that he takes in sonnet 115, where it is clear that the affair is doomed to become a memory...
...The sonnets describe a passionate, complicated, and doomed affair between the "I" character, a married man, and a beautiful, blond, Scotch-drinking woman who is also married...
...Grossly however bound And jacketed apart, ensample-wound, We come so little and can so little stay Together, what can we know...
...There nothing????there all????vast wing beating dark?Voiceless, the terrible I AM...
...The sonnets have none of the innovations that such younger poets as John Ashbery and Michael Mc-Clure have introduced into the form: the open field, the wild breath line, the indeterminate number of lines????all of which help to make the sonnet a flexible instrument for the expression of the 1960s...
...Here is one in which Berryman succeeds particularly well in fusing thought and passion in a manner that could be characterized as metaphysical: "/ couldn't leave you" you confessed next day...
...I think it was George Bernard Shaw who once said that love is an exaggerated conception of the difference between one person and all others...
...It is probably because of this intimate, confessional feature, bearing inevitably on the lives of his friends, that Berryman has withheld the sonnets from publication for these 20 years...
...The sonnets, however, are not as outstanding as the poet's recent Dream Songs...
...And sometimes Berryman is so wound up in his meditations (as in his self-conscious sonnet 50) that he achieves an effect of abstraction that is contrary to his stated aim: "I want a verse fresh as a bubble breaks,/As little false...
...Reviewed by stephen stepanchev Professor of English, Queens College Berryman s Sonnets is a beautifully made book, so well designed by Herb Johnson and so handsomely printed on rich, heavy paper that it is a pleasure to hold in one's hands...
...often there is a structural break after the octave...
...Appropriately enough, it contains a sequence of 115 love sonnets that John Berryman wrote "a thousand years ago," as he reveals in the prefatory Dream Song, "for an Excellent lady, wif whom he was in wuv...
...This may be too reasonable an approach to what is, after all, emotional dynamite, but one does get tired of the lover's sighing and puffing and scheming...
...But it must be said that lines 3-7 are not particularly imaginative, and in line 7 Berryman allows himself a characteristic cute-ness: an inversion in "vein profound...
...Isn't it all a manifestation of ego, of pride...
...The sonnets seem to be autobiographical, but this assumption may be false, for poets have a way of reworking and transforming their experience so that it is vastly different from the germinal fact (even when they claim to be writing auto-biographically...
...Berryman is a thoroughly professional poet, but there are a number of features about his style that some may consider mildly irritating...
...Although the sequence is not, really, a narrative poem????berryman focuses on passionate moments and gives them lyric treatment????the sonnets, taken together, do tell a story of sorts...
...None of the recent poets is interested in achieving the marmoreal monumentality and perfection of the past...
...At any rate, there is a "confessional" note in these poems, very much like the strain one hears in the poems of Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath...
...This sort of assertion is possible only to one deeply in love...
...At one point the despairing lover wishes that his wife could fall in love with Lise's husband and so simplify a virtually unbearable situation...
...The best sonnets are numbered 7, 32, 34, 54, 56, 64, 68, 77, 79, 89, 114, and 115...
...He likes alliteration ("My daring fondle, fumble of far fire") and such archaisms as "natheless" and "alas...
...they write imperfectly but with dazzling insight into an imperfect world...
...Or like some outcast ancient Jew to say: "There is Judaea: in it Jerusalem: In that the Temple: in the Temple's inmost Holy of holies hides the invisible Ark...
...As everyone knows, there is a Commandment against adulterous love, and yet here, in the private cosmos of the two lovers, the commandment to cleave, dictated by their love, is as powerful as the law engraved on the tablets of Moses...
...The sonnet is well made...
...the trope achieves emphasis by exaggeration...
...The book represents a valuable recovery of work from a period in Berryman's life that has previously been little known...
...For what the lover is saying, essentially, is that the private law of lovers is as strong and undeniable as the Law of Moses, the Covenant of the Ark, the Ten Commandments...
...that is, they have 14 lines and are written in the Petrarchan or Italian form...
...Berryman is much closer in spirit and aim to Merrill Moore, the nearly forgotten psychiatrist and sonneteer, who in 1938 published M, a collection of a thousand sonnets of an autobiographical character (he wrote over 50,000 in his lifetime...
...The style is the witty, mannered, allusive style of Berryman in the 1940s, when he wrote the poems of The Dispossessed (1948...
...As a record of a passion so overwhelming that it destroys a man's profoundest commitments, the sonnet sequence is both fascinating and disturbing...
...Here is another example: Your friends 1 don't like all, and poetry You less than music stir to, the blue streak Troubles me you drink...
...The two couples know each other????they are, in fact, close personal friends ????and so the relationship between the speaker and Lise, the blonde, makes for awkwardness, hypocrisy, furtive lovemaking, dangerous trysts, guilts, etc...
...It is obvious that the poet was aware of the fact that these lines would sound horribly prosaic if the syntax were straightened out, but the effect of the inversions, unfortunately, is mannered and arch...
...The thing that I find fascinating about this sonnet is that the poet is working in terms of a paradox that everyone but the lover must find at least a little humorous...
...Love may be, as they say, a desire to procreate in beauty, but is it necessary to break so many bones in the effort to satisfy it...
...Reading the sonnet, one smiles and says, "Well, they certainly are in love...
...For the sake of emphasis and variety, Berryman introduces a number of metrical variations in his rhythmic structure, but he is far more respectful in these sonnets of the accentual-syllabic system to which he is committed than he is in his Dream Songs, which are also metered and rhymed but move along so joyously in their colloquialism that one is virtually unaware of their formal structure, the skeleton...
...The measure is iambic pentameter, and the rhyme scheme is, generally, abbaabba cdecde...
...the lost Tables of stone with the Law graved on them...
...One can't take it too seriously...
...Our law too binds...
...One wonders, again, whether modern man does not overvalue love and love-making as a means of achieving an identity and of putting excitement into an otherwise drab life...
...Well, what is the nature of Berry-man's confession...
...Technically, the sonnets are traditional...
...Why is he so sensitive about it...
...Anything may Amaze me: this did...
...it lacks the gay, zany, boozily extravagant colloquialism and the bounce, vigor, and comedy of 77 Dream Songs (1964), a remarkable and memorable exploration of the joys and pains of a 20th century consciousness...
Vol. 50 • May 1967 • No. 11
