This is not my first rodeo with John Berryman’s Dream Songs, but I feel like I have much more of an appreciation on how to read them. Upon reflection of how to do an explication of the first of them, “Dream Song 1,” I became hesitant; is it appropriate to do a close reading of a poem while ignoring biographical information? Is that too much of a New Critical approach, and since so many of our poets chafe under that approach, should I ignore the psychoanalysis that our reading argues Berryman perhaps wrote with in mind?
Regardless, “Huffy Henry hid” (1) and “sulked” (2). Why he did this is answered in the third line, as the speaker (“I”) relates that Henry was grappling with something: “-a trying to put things over” (3). Whatever this “trying to put things over” is about, it is clear that Henry is uneasy and reluctant: “It was the thought that they thought/they could do it made Henry wicked & away” (4-5). The italics certainly seem to emphasize Henry’s disbelief that whomever these people are, that they would do something that would negatively affect Henry. If we can take the “putting things over” as somebody tried to “put something over” on Henry, we can understand his reluctance to talk about it, especially if “they” had some influence in Henry’s life. Yet the language perhaps softens at the sixth line, with “But he should have come out and talked.” Perhaps if Henry had said with his own words, relayed his own thoughts in a manner in which he wanted to be understood, then nobody else could put something over on him.
Whatever this event was, whomever these people were, seems to have shaken Henry’s core. For once upon a time “All the world like a woolen love/once did seem on Henry’s side” (7-8), in which a “woolen lover” might be considered as soft or warm. But then comes the single blunt sentence “Then came a departure” (9), followed quickly with “Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought” (10). Whatever departed, Henry is shattered, and nothing happens that he expects to happen, things are not “right.” Finally, however, we get a better idea of what exactly happened to Henry: “I don’t see how Henry, pried/open for all the world to see, survived” (11-12). Whatever initially happened in the poem that made Henry so sulky happened clearly because of some sort of invasion of privacy, as Henry is “pried/open for all the world to see” (11-12). Ignoring anything biographical or contextual about Berryman that might explain a deeper, real-work meaning, Henry is not only upset that he suddenly lacks the comfort of privacy but that someone had the gall to take it away (“they thought they could do it”).
The next stanza begins with a tricky pair of lines: “What he has now to say is a long/wonder the world can bear & be” (13-14). Grammatically, we can interpret these lines in two ways. One is that Henry is actually wondering how the world can hear what he has to say and continue turning. A second is that the speaker is wondering the same thing, especially because he reappears in the next lines: “Once in a sycamore I was glad/all at the top, and I sang” (15-16). The Dream Songs have the propensity to shift register and sometimes person mid-poem, but I think it is safe to say that the thirteenth and fourteenth lines can have both meanings simultaneously, leading the speaker to compare his stay at the top of a sycamore tree to Henry’s words “he has now to say,” most likely in response to the “putting things over” and exposure that has happened to Henry in the other stanzas. The symbolism of the sycamore tree is vague here, although the speaker is at the top, perhaps meaning that once he/Henry was on top of things (instead of something being put over on them); the sycamore also carries some biblical connotations, such as being the tree that Zaccheus descended from to greet Jesus. If the latter were our reading, then after coming down from the sycamore, the world may not seem as grand as when the speaker were at the top; expecting Jesus, the speaker instead sees a different world entirely.
In this post-sycamore world from which the speaker has descended, after Henry is exposed, possibly by others, desolation reigns: “Hard on the land wears the strong sea/and empty grows every bed” (17-18). Now, all the land, including maybe where the sycamore tree once was, is being worn away by the “strong sea,” leaving a new and bleak landscape for Henry to survey. How different the world is from the days of the world as a woolen lover, where Henry had the intimacy of privacy; now all the beds grow empty. It should be noted that the beds are not empty already, but are becoming so. Henry’s (and the speaker’s) worldviews are changing, and they can no longer hold to themselves the privacy they once held so dear. But then again, maybe the world itself is changing too.
Read without the helpful biographical or background information, what are these Dream Songs longing after? Many are quite humorous, but many have a sort of desperate quality to them. If we ignore Berryman biographically, is it possible to read these poems as confessional? And what are they confessing?
Works Cited
“Dream Song 1.” poets.org. Academy of American Poets, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/dream-song-1. Accessed 20 Feb. 2017.
Bonus! I know it’s not the cool site we use in class, but here is Berryman reading this Dream Song. Love it.
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