The poet introduces John Berryman and his sonnets:

He made, a thousand years ago, a-many songs For an excellent lady, wif whom he was in wuv.

Even after all those years (it's probably only twenty or so) he has to console himself with an unconvincingly ironic and playful mispronunciation of his feelings. She may indeed have been excellent, but the sonnets reveal that she was also inconsiderate, thoroughly unpredictable, a heavy drinker (perhaps alcoholic), and the wife of a close friend. It still hurts just to remember the lady and his responses to her. Berryman would like us to believe that it all happened when he was still a boy, not a lover, only a wuver.

Berryman is too precise a poet, too careful with his words, and too honest about himself not to have done this completely intentionally. His little statement about his "wuv" prepares the reader pretty well for the 115 sonnets it introduces. With the same accurate, often ironic, self-assessment, and with the passion which those two lines betray. Berryman set out to explore and compose his contradictory reactions to the excellent lady, his adulterous lover.

Another modern poet might have preferred a single long poem to examine and express his emotional contradictions (Roethke's The Lost Son), or perhaps a series of poems less restrictive in form than the sonnet (Snod-grass Heart's Needle). But Berryman chose a sequence of sonnets, a selection which is initially mysterious: a sonnetter inherits elaborate conventions of expression so often used as to seem, almost invariably, stale and uncommunicative to a modern audience. Berryman enthusiastically accepts these restrictions and puts them to work for himself. A single sonnet is particularly suited to the elaborate presentation of one feeling. In a sequence of sonnets a larger pattern of responses to a single intense emotion--invariably love--emerges.

So it is with Berryman's sonnets. Recognizing that a sonnet sequence was just what he wanted to write, he animated the conventions, utilized the restrictions, and made himself a sonneteer:

Also there was Laura and three seventeen

Sonnets to something like her . . . twenty-one years . . .

He never touched her. Swirl our crimes and crimes.

Gold-haired (too), dark eyed, ignorant of rimes

Was she? Virtuous? The old brume seldom clears.

-- Two guilty and crepe-yellow months

Lise! be our bright surviving actual scene.

But with Berryman's sonnets there is a difference. Lise, excellent lady, is neither untouched nor particularly virtuous. Crimes of adultery and deception have been committed. Nor is the poet attempting either a temporary seduction (already accomplished) or (at first) a permanent possession of the Lady. The affair is intense; its emotions range from guilt and despair to real joy and momentary hope. Berryman attempts to involve the excellent lady in all of that intensity and emotional chaos. The guilt and self-effacement, he insists, should be shared as well as the joy; after an octet's abstract discussion of adultery and adulterers, then--

. . . I am this strange thing I despised; you are.