John Berryman: Selected Poems

edited by kevin young

Introduction

Early Poems 1935-1942

Note on E. A. Robinson

Elegy: Hart Crane

The Second Cactus

Prague

The Apparition

The Curse

To Bhain Campbell

Epilogue

from The Dispossessed (1948)

Winter Landscape

The Traveller

The Ball Poem

Parting as Descent

Letter to His Brother

The Animal Trainer (1)

The Animal Trainer (2)

1 September 1939

The Moon and the Night and the Men

A Poem for Bhain

Canto Amor

from The Nervous Songs

The Song of the Demented Priest

A Professor's Song

The Song of the Tortured Girl

A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away

New Year's Eve

Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956)

from Berryman's Sonnets (1967)

"He made, a thousand year ago, a-many songs"

1: "I wished, all the mild days of middle March"

3: "Who for those ages ever without some blood"

5: "The poet hunched, so, whom the worlds admire"

7: "I've found out why, that day, that suicide"

9: "Great citadels whereon the gold sun falls"

10: "You in your stone home where the sycamore"

11: "I expect you from the North. The path winds in"

13: "I lift--lift you five States away your glass"

14: "Moths white as ghosts among these hundreds cling"

18: "You, Lise, contrite I never thought to see"

19: "You sailed in sky-high, with your speech askew"

20: "Presidential flags! and the General is here,"

22: "If not white shorts--then in a princess gown"

23: "They may suppose, because I would not cloy your ear--"

24: "Still it pleads and rankles: 'Why do you love me?"

25: "Sometimes the night echoes to prideless wailing"

30: "Of all that weeks-long day, though call it back"

31: "Troubling are masks . . the faces of friends, my face"

33: "Audacities and fêtes of the drunken weeks!"

36: "Keep your eyes open when you kiss: do: when"

37: "Sigh as it ends . . I keep an eye on your"

43: "You should be gone in winter, that Nature mourn"

46: "Are we? You murmur 'not'. What of the night"

47: "How far upon these songs with my strict wrist"

51: "A tongue there is wags, down in the dark wood O:"

54: "It was the sky all day I grew to and saw."

60: "Today is it? Is it today? I shudder"

66: "Astronomies and slangs to find you, dear,"

67: "Faith like the warrior ant swarming, enslaving"

68: "Where the lane from the highway swerves the first drops fell"

70: "Under Scorpion both, back in the Sooner State"

71: "Our Sunday morning when dawn-priests were applying"

72: "A Cambridge friend put in,--one whom I used"

73: "Demand me again what Kafka's riddles mean,"

77: "Fall and rise of her midriff bells. I watch."

78: "On the wheat-sacks, sullen with the ceaseless damp,"

79: "I dreamt he drove me back to the asylum"

82: "Why can't, Lise, why shouldn't they fall in love?"

86: "Our lives before bitterly our mistake!--"

88: "Anomalous I linger, and ignore"

94: "Most strange, my change, this nervous interim.-"

96: "It will seem strange, no more this range on range"

97: "I say I laid siege--you enchanted me . ."

100: "I am interested alone in making ready,"

101: "Because I'd seen you not believe your lover,"

103: "A 'broken heart' .. but can a heart break, now?"

104: "A spot of poontang on a five-foot piece,"

106: "Began with swirling, blind, unstilled oh still,--"

107: "Darling I wait O in my upstairs box"

108: "I owe you, do I not, a roofer: though"

109: "Ménage à trois, like Tristan's,--difficult! . ."

112: "I break my pace now for a sonic boom,"

113: "'I didn't see anyone else, I just saw Lise'"

114: "You come blonde visiting through the black air"

115: "All we were going strong last night this time,"

from His Thought Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt (1958)

The Poet's Final Instructions

from The Black Book (i)

from The Black Book (iii)

A Sympathy, A Welcome

Note to Wang Wei

Poems 1950-1964

from The Black Book

The Will

Waiting

Of Isaac Rosenfeld

Formal Elegy

from The Dream Songs:

from 77 Dream Songs (1964)

1: "Huffy Henry hid     the day,"

3: A Stimulant for an Old Beast

4: "Filling her compact & delicious body"

13: "God bless Henry. He lived like a rat,"

14: "Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so."

18: A Strut for Roethke

22: Of 1826

23: The Lay of Ike

24: "Oh servant Henry lectured till"

26: "The glories of the world struck me, made me aria, once."

28: Snow Line

29: "There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart"

30: "Collating bones: I would have liked to do."

34: "My mother has your shotgun. One man, wide"

36: "The high ones die, die. They die. You look up and who's there?"

37: Three Around the Old Gentleman

40: "I'm scared a lonely. Never see my son,"

41: "If we sang in the wood (and Death is a German expert)"

45: "He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back."

46: "I am, outside. Incredible panic rules."

48: "He yelled at me in Greek,"

50: "In a motion of night they massed nearer my post."

51: "Our wounds to time, from all the other times,"

53: "He lay in the middle of the world, and twitcht."

54. "'NO VISITORS' I thumb the roller to"

55: "Peter's not friendly. He gives me sideways looks."

63: "Bats have no bankers and they do not drink"

67: "I don't operate often. When I do,"

68: "I heard, could be, a Hey there from the wing,"

69: "Love her he doesn't but the thought he puts"

70: "Disengaged, bloody, Henry rose from the shell"

75: "Turning it over, considering, like a madman"

76: Henry's Confession

77: "Seedy Henry rose up shy in de world"

from His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968)

78: Op. posth. no. 1

79: Op. posth. no. 2

91: Op. posth. no. 14

93: "General Fatigue stalked in, & a Major-General,"

143: "--That's enough of that, Mr Bones. Some lady you make."

145: "Also I love him: me he's done no wrong"

147: "Henry's mind grew blacker the more he thought."

148: Glimmerings

150: "He had followers but they could not find him;"

151: "Bitter & bleary over Delmore's dying:"

152: "I bid you then a raggeder farewell"

153: "I'm cross with god who has wrecked this generation."

155: "I can't get him out of my mind, out of my mind,"

156: "I give in. I must not leave     the scene of this same death"

159: "Panic & shock, together. They are all going away."

192: "Love me love me love me love me love me"

135: "Tears Henry shed for poor old Hemingway"

239: "Am I a bad man? Am I a good man?"

279: "Leaving behind the country of the dead"

327: "Freud was some wrong about dreams, or almost all;"

350: "All the girls, with their vivacious littles,"

354: "The only happy people in the world"

366: "Chilled in this Irish pub I wish my loves"

381: "Cave-man Henry grumbled to his spouse"

382: "At Henry's bier let some thing fall out well:"

384: "The marker slants, flowerless, day's almost done,"

385: "My daughter's heavier. Light leaves are flying."

from Love & Fame (1970)

Freshman Blues

Nowhere

The Heroes

Recovery

Have a Genuine American Horror-&-Mist on the Rocks

Of Suicide

The Hell Poem

Death Ballad

Heaven

The Home Ballad

from Eleven Addresses to the Lord

1: "Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake,"

3: "Sole watchman of the flying stars, guard me"

6: "Under new management, Your Majesty:"

8: A Prayer for the Self

from Delusions, Etc.(1972)

from Opus Dei:

Lauds

Compline

Washington in Love

Your Birthday in Wisconsin You Are 140

He Resigns

from Scherzo:

Henry by Night

Henry's Understanding

Defensio in Extremis

Somber Prayer

Overseas Prayer

Certainty Before Lunch

'How Do You Do, Dr Berryman, Sir?'

King David Dances

Biographical Note

Note on the Texts

Notes

Index of Titles and First Lines