ancient fires for eyes, his head full

& his heart full, he's making ready to move on. (III)

[something: Charles Whitman or Fate]

... in the summer dawn

left Henry to live on. (VI)

... let's go on toward the sea. (VI)

but other than that I cannot see the pattern. It may be something like a movie, with each poem representing a frame that catches one particular mood or incident, but the movie is without a plot. Henry's life has no clear climaxes and denouments. Each instant is equal. "The Dream Songs" starts and ends in the middle of Henry's life. It goes nowhere and proves nothing, but that Henry is Henry and is still alive. The pattern, if there is one, may not be evident even to Berryman, and certainly not to Henry. Berryman says "its ultimate structure ... [is] according to his [Henry's] nature" (293), but that is not much help to the reader.

The one shift I did notice between the opening of "The Dream Songs" and the end is a greater awareness of immediate circumstance. The Songs become progressively less like dreams and more like "reality," and one of the results is that the later books are more easily understood. If you think I am shirking my critic's responsibility to make the book clear, let me assure you I am: there is a great deal about this book I cannot follow.

WHAT IS CLEAR is that Berryman is "tense with love" (279), though "truly isolated, pal," (203). He has wrestled out of himself a "yes" to the world and his own soul, and in the meantime he has created a delightful, profound, and moving poem. What Berryman means to say escapes him, as it must. Like all poets he longs for something he will never find, something he cannot even see. That something fills him with "nostalgia for things unknown" (211), but he knows it is beyond him.

But I am talking of the poet as he sees himself; the reader sees something different. Picture a seagull unhappy, hungry for a clam. He flies in perfect beauty, a perfect grace visible to all eyes but his own. John Berryman, however difficult his own muddle may be, exhibits to us a true grace of craftsmanship and earnestness.

Near the end his black companion asks him, "Is you going?", to which he responds.

--Oh, I suffer from a strike

& a strike & three balls: I stand up for much,

Wordsworth & that sort of thing.

The pitcher dreamed. He threw a hazy curve,