John Berryman - Delusions, Etc. of John Berryman

by John Berryman POEMS 1942 THE DISPOSSESSED 1948 HOMAGE TO MISTRESS BRADSTREET 1956 77 DREAM SONGS 1964 HIS TOY, HIS DREAM, HIS REST 1968 SHORT POEMS 1967 BERRYMANS SONNETS 1967 THE DREAM SONGS 1969 LOVE & FAME 1970 DELUSIONS, ETC . 1972 Lauds L ET us rejoice on our cots, for His nocturnal miracles antique outside the Local Group & within it & within our hearts in it, and for quotidian miracles parsecs-off yielding to the Hale reflector. Oh He is potent in the corners. Men with Him are potent: quasars we intuit, and sequent to sufficient discipline we perceive this glow keeping His winter out. My marvellous black new brim-rolled felt is both stuffy & raffish. I hit my summit with it, in firelight.

Maybe I only got a Yuletide tie (increasing sixty) & some writing-paper but ha (ha ha ) Ive bought myself a hat! Plus-strokes from position zero! Its feathers sprout. Thank you, Your Benevolence! permissive, smiling on our silliness You forged. Washington in Love I Rectitude, and the terrible upstanding member II The music of our musketry is: beautiful III Intolerable Sally, loved in vain IV Mr Adams of Massachusetts I accept, gentlemen. V Aloes. Adders. Roman gratitude.

VI My porch elevation from the Potomac is 174, 7. VII Bring the wounded, Martha! Bring the wounded, men. Beethoven Triumphant D OOMS menace from tumults. Whos immune among our mightier of headed men? Chary with his loins womanward, he begot us an enigma. Often pretended he was absentminded whenas he couldnt hear; and often was. always he, he everywhere, as one says of Napoleon (Sir John Russell in 21 hearing a Trio) O migratory rooms, the unworthy brothers, the worthless nephew! One time his landlord tipped a hat to him; Beethoven moved.

Awkward & plangent charged to the Archdukes foot,who told his court Leave him alone. My unpretending loves the B flat major by the old Budapest done. Schnabel did record the Diabelli varia. I cant get a copy. Then theres Casals I have, 101, both parts. Moments are, early on in the 4th Piano Concerto show him at his unrivalled middle best.

It does go up and up, and down lingeringly. Miser & Timon-giving, by queer turns. They wanted him London, partout. Too late, Too late he muttered, and mimicked piano-playing. Prodigious, so he never knew his age his fatherd lied about. Whatever his kindness to Rossini and contempt for Italians, if down he sat a while in an exquisite chair it had to be thrown out (five witnesses, none of whom says quite why).

O did he sleep sound? Heavy, heavy that. Waked at 3:30 not by some sonata but by a botched rehearsal of the Eighth where all thing has to go right (Koussevitzky will make it, Master; lie back down) Lies of his fluency from Betty von Arnim to eager Goethe, whod not met the man. Fact is, he stumbled at the start and in the sequence, stumbled in the middle, Often unsure at the endshown by his wilderness on-sketchings encrusted like Tolstoy (not Mozart: whod, ripping napkins, the whole strict in mind before notes serried; limitationless, unlike you). Inundations out from ground zero. Back from an over-wealth, the simplification of Necessity. When brother Johann signed Real Estate Owner, you: Brain owner.

And what, among fumbling notes, in the nights, did you read? Coffee and tallow spot your Odyssey though, and when Schindler was an arse to ask your drift in Opus 31 and the Appassionata you uttered at him, cheerful, Just read The Tempest. Thinking presides, some think now,only presides at the debate of the Instincts; but presides, over powers, over love, hurt-back. You grumbled: Religion and Figured Bass are closed concepts. Dont argue. To disabuse the Heiligerdankgesang? Men up to now sometimes weep openly. Tortured your surly star to sing impossibly against the whole (small) thwarting orchestra.

One chord thrusts, as it must find allies, foes, resolve, in subdued crescendo. Unfazed, you built-in the improbable. You clowned. You made throats swallow and shivered the backs of necks. You made quiver with glee, at will; not long. This world is of male energy male pain.

Softnesses, also yours, which become us. What stayed your chosen instrument? The cello? At two points. At others, the forte-piano. At others, the fiddles & viola & cello. Im hard to you, odd nights. I bulge my brain, my shut chest already suffers,so I play blues and Haydn whom youboth the which touch but they dont ache me.

Im less inured in your disaster corner, Master. You interfere. O yes we interfere or were mere sweetening: what? the alkali lives around and after ours. Sleeking down nerves Passing time dreaming. And you did do that too. There hover Things cannot be banned by you; damned few.

If we take our head in our ears and listen Ears! Ears! the Devil paddled in you heard not a hill flute or a shepherd sing! tensing your vision onto an alarm of gravid measures, sequent to demure, all we fall, absently foreknowing. You force a blurt: Who was I? Am I these tutti, am I this rallentando? This entrance of the oboe? I am all these the sane man makes reply on the locked ward. Did ever you more than (clearly) cope odd women? save clumsy uncommitted overtures au moins Josphine? save the world-famous unsent or when retrieved and past-death-treasured letter? Deception spared. No doubt he took one look: Not mine; I cant make a kroner there. Straightforward staves, dark bars, late motions toward the illegible. Musical thighs, spared deep age.

Out at prime, in a storm inaudible thunder he went, upon his height. The other day I called our chief prose-writer at home a thousand miles off and began How are you, Sir? out of three decades amity Im OLD , he said. Neither of us laughed. Spared deep age, Beethoven. I wish youd caught young Schuberts last chamberworks and the Winterreise you could have read through, puffing. Ah but the indignities you flew free from, your self-abasements even would increase together with your temper, evil already, some person of bad character, churlish & eccentric For refusing to scribble a word of introduction: He is an unlicked bearalmost Sam Johnson.

An entertainer, a Molire, in the onset under too nearly Mozarts aegis, the mysteries of Oedipus old were not beyond you. Islands of suffering & disenchantment & enchantment. But the brother charged the dying brother board & lodging. Bedbugs biting, stench, unquenchable thirst, ungovernable swelling. Then the great Malfatti gave up on, and accorded frozen punch ad lib. Your body-filth flowed on to the middle of the floor I shall, no doubt, soon be going above sweat beading you, gasping of Shakespeare, knocking over the picture of Haydns birthplace.

They said you died. 20,000 persons of every class clashed at the gates of the house of mourning, till they locked them. Franz Schubert stalked the five hundred feet to the church. Its a lie! Youre all over my wall! You march and chant around here! I hear your thighs. Your Birthday in Wisconsin You Are 140 O NE of the wits of the school your chum would say Hot diggity! What the hell went wrong for you, Miss Emily,besides the pure & terrible Congressman your paralyzing papa,and Mr Humphreys dying & Benjamins the other reader? Fantastic at 32 outpour, uproar, terror since September, I could tell to none after your Master moved his family West and timidly to Mr Higginson: say if my verse is alive. Now you wore only white, now you did not appear, till frantic 50 when you hurled your heart down before Otis, who would none of it thro five years for Squire Dickinsons cracked daughter awful by months, by hours Well.

Thursday afternoon, Im in W drinking your ditties, and (dear) they are alive, more so than (bless her) Mrs F who teaches farmers red daughters & their beaux my ditties and yours & yours & yours! Hot diggity! Drugs Alcohol Little Sister (18871914) W HEN I peered out, he had nine nights to spare after his gun was man-handled from him while the dying in his care mountained and the weakened mind gave way. So far off to my flatland flew no moan whod fail to focus yet for silly weeks. I shoot him, though, a fellow agony then I could hardly coo now I must speak (back from this schwartze Verwesung whose white arms lean subtle over ivories & blacks and I am sweating, her blind scent subdues ordure & the hiss of souls escaping) for let us not all together in such pain dumb apart pale into oblivionno! Trakl, con the male nurse. Surmounted by carrion, cry out and overdose & go. In Memoriam (1914-1953) I T OOK my leave (last) five times before the end and even past these precautions lost the end. Oh, I was highlone in the corridor fifteen feet from his bed where no other hovered, nurse or staff or friend, and only the terrible breathing ever took place, but trembling nearer after some small time I came on the tent collapsed and silenceO unable to say when.