has sacrifices which it puts in play,

I hope he's sitting with his peers: sit, sit,

& recover & be whole. (157)

Henry often thinks of death ("... may a niche be found/ in nothingness" 239) and of endurance:

What can be piled on Henry Henry can take (202)

O much, so much to be done (329)

All right, I'll stay (179).

He talks of going to pieces again and again:

... he went to pieces.

The pieces sat up & wrote. (311)

and always he is

perplexed whether to shout or moan

over man's riddling fate. (290)

In short, Henry is constantly in distress, the same kind of immense and trivial distress that afflicts everyone. The poems ring true because, although many of the subtleties may be lost, the essential confusion of modern men is there.

IT IS difficult to talk about the arrangement of the poems. The ordering of the 385 is no doubt important, but I do not understand its logic. The books seem to be arranged by the time and place they were written. Book VII was written during Berryman's stay in Ireland; Book VI is a leave-taking of America, and it starts with the leave-taking of a friend -- the ten elegies on Delmore Schwartz; Book V seems to center on a stay in the hospital; Book IV is mysteriously entitled "Opus Posthumous." Each book ends on an upbeat: