Rapidly Shafting States of Mind

...Henry's states of mind are the binding element: his bitter-informed consciousness, his awareness, his juggling act in trying to balance the pressuring diversities...

...No symbols...

...Berryman is appropriately not too respectful...

...or playing off echoes of Cummings, Pound ("Go, ill-sped book") and others...

...There is not sufficient contrast between language as it can be when kidded and prodded and dislocated for the sake of eccentric or staggering effects, and language as it is when ordered less intimately, casually and crazily...

...Henry's own father, as more than one song tells us, also committed suicide, and he contemplates doing the same...

...Do the dream songs descend by a crooked branch from Pound's Cantos...

...Contingent Henry in a thoroughly contingent world collates his rapidly shifting states of mind...

...But there is much variousness, too...

...For it is not merely common turns of speech one hears in the songs...

...Is there a more inclusive resonance that holds the songs in relation to one another and gives the impression of some resolving structure...

...Henry has his enemies, and luckily many friends who write him loving letters and send him cables (when he has decamped to Ireland to write more and more songs...

...In fact, all the songs have authority, whether they are furious and direct, wrenching the language for effects...

...Naked the man came forth in his mask, to be...

...As a reader you are exposed to a hundred fever fits of the "egotistical sublime" persona (as Keats called Wordsworth), Henry...

...Pace the Vietnam song ("Henry shuddered: a war which was no war, the enemy was not our enemy/but theirs whoever they are...

...the intellectuals' Everyman...

...He says a song for Hemingway, whose father committed suicide and left his son a rifle as sinister heritage...

...The book also begins with Henry's posthumous songs (his Active death) and ends on the same note—Henry's putative bier and how he would have his funeral go...

...There are omnipresent themes: death and disfiguration, sickness and busyness, loss and Henry trying to cut his losses, Henry as comedian of agile antics, Henry aging and declaiming against it and God...

...Pain and the sense of dislocation (and dislocated syntax) are on the whole the constants in Henry's inconstant world...

...They even have the disturbing characteristic of making one accept them in toto as one reads them...

...Henry is in more or less perpetual existential anguish, as it is called these days, in his grief of longing ("Green grieves the Prince over his girl forgone") or grief of mourning for his lost, perished friends...

...Those lines from Sir Walter Raleigh come to mind...

...Ergo—no resolutions, no solutions, only dissolutions...

...But it cannot be said of Berryman, as it was of Yeats, that he exploits the common turns of speech for the sake of irony...

...or achieving in the elegies for Delmore Schwartz and the other laments for his poet friends, now dead, an open, large, slow spokenness—like music...

...He has published 278 more, and they are now known as His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 317 pp., $6.50...

...It is out of this fluid stream of irrelevant relevancies and incidental accidentals that a continuity is made?albeit a discontinuous continuity...

...But the question remains: Since they are called dream songs, how do they sing...

...With him, you take temperatures of his soul...

...But it is another effect one is looking for...

...The connectedness of the songs—the diary substructure, if you will—allows for all kinds of intimate and incidental detail, the half shades and small shades that unfold another turn in the psychic landscape of shifting and twisting Henry...

...Perhaps it is a kind of resonant silence (these are oddly noisy songs), or a kind of overtone that is consonant with some larger calm—like an afterglow...

...not the Poundian mosaic, but the way we live—or Henry does—and the tone of the times, including songs on famous murder cases and political scandals...

...Death, then, can certainly be called the thematic parenthesis...

...He fulminates greatly on death, the abstract obscenity ("death grew tall/up Henry as a child") and is as eager for life, for more love, and for all the rewards of love and fame (fame that also "makes him lazy...

...Only in so far as Berryman is trying to get a great deal of his own kind of history in...

...They apply vaguely, but only vaguely, to these songs that do not sing but talk, that are hurling, spinning, bedeviled, restless, full of abrupt turns, ellipsis and anacoluthon, that are slangy, comic, sometimes harshly lofty...

...Henry saw with Tolstoyan clarity his muffled purposes...

...The Valentine song is a masterpiece of lightness and intricacy of rhythms and themes, and many of the love songs and the take-offs on Spenser's dragons on the Irish plains have the same kind of charmed authority...

...Henry is today's man, a kind that is nervous and gifted, eager and tense, who lives in a sense by his eccentricities...

...They create the reality of a mind—Henry's mind—that is impinged on by the world it perpetually fights and calls into question with alert mental gymnastics...

...In the earlier set of dream songs, Berryman found his highly stylized, charged-up foxy language—set forth in three six-line stanzas, the lines sometimes rhyming and sometimes not...

...Yet this would seem false to the purposes of these songs—a chronicle of disequilibrium in a contingent world...

...His life in its disheveled detail begins to emerge much more clearly...

...Style is defined again in these lines: / consider a song will be as humming-bird swift, down-light, missile-hard & strange as the world of anti-matter The strangeness is there, abetted by the crazy bareness of so active a language, by the erratic and eel-swift movement too, and by the unpredictable leapings of the imagination...

...They are directly, vividly conversational...

...If Yeats fought his own long battle to arrive at the position where he could use colloquialisms, they were also worked against his own immense style of utterance...

...Life is very exciting and tiring with tireless Henry...

...they are larded with slang, with all the specialized jargon of the moment...

...These new dream songs continue Henry's life and thoughts, but they hang much more closely together...

...Is there any big luminous parenthesis enclosing all this...

...But we are on the surface too much of the time...

...You are up and down, in seesaw disequilibrium, as song succeeds song...

...he mocks them or is playful for the sake of dramatic effect and/or truthfulness...

...Indeed, the energy and inventive exuberance of these songs, the sheer performance itself, the antic sportive-ness of language ("Calamity Jane lies very still/her soles to Wild Bill's skull"), the utter definiteness of language, verb-active and hard, make these songs consistently absorbing and interesting...

...There, Henry whoever-he-is—the very special undercover Everyman...

...Enough for the action of these songs...

...They exist in relation to one another, in a kind of pattern, a large part of which is the writing itself of the songs: the sea voyage to Ireland with portfolios bulging...

...There are no stock responses, even about death...

...He drinks and has hangovers, is in and out of hospitals ("He sang on like a harmful bird"), is often in some state of crisis...

...pace the songs on brainsick Whitman in his Texas tower, on the Hall-Mills murder (a song of raging grisliness on how those killings under the crab apple tree were consummated), on the Profumo scandal—each brilliantly set forth in the driving language that gets there at once...

...This is the stuff of his "dream" songs...

...He is wonn with a world of despayre/ And is lost with a toye...

...Berryman thus defines in one song what he is doing...

...And they employ all kinds of tactics to rev up the diction...

...Even in Henry's soul-storms and nightmares and angsts, image and sound do not build whatever has mysterious and secret resonances through some mysterious tension...

...Song after Henry's song, however, is worked in nothing but nervy patter—not to forget the baby talk ("Henry wus in wuv" and "bad oF Time...

...The title has its ironical overtones, for these poems are not songs per se, nor do they deal with dreams as such...

...Very well...

...Henry lives in pain and fear and dread, an American in the middle of violence...

...Not a symbol in the place...

...The dislocations, the jagged edges, the constant dissolvings of one scene into another, intrude and insist...

...Yet, all too curiously, they seem to remain on the surface, mirroring it in frantic and savage or comic and bizarre ways...

...the work of years, there in the Irish mists to be touched, Henry trusts, into final and lasting life...

...There is a faint likeness of a "dream" plot, a thread at least from which the songs hang, a kind of diary of the intermitted moments of a plagued and witty spirit whose erraticisms and trials are depicted with mock humor...

...Bones...

...The poet's own diction seems to have been taken over by his mouthpiece, the obsessing and obsessed Henry...

...or Henry, mere mask and stalking-horse for the poet himself—was introduced, along with his other self, the blackface minstrel-talking Mr...