With today being April 1, it seems appropriate to consider whether Berryman’s overall tone in The Dream Songs tends more towards the comedic or tragic. It could be argued that since the format has similarities to a vaudeville show, there is an underlying humor throughout Henry’s monologues, though tinted with pathos and self-deprecation. However, with Berryman I am unable to separate the poet from the poetry, or in this case, Henry. Seeing as how Berryman was troubled with depression and alcoholism, eventually killed himself by jumping from a bridge in Minneapolis, that his father also killed himself when Berryman was 12, that the book hints of death through its entirety, and that Berryman draws upon a form of insensitive entertainment that was derived from one of America’s worst moral infringements, the comedy of which being a sick farce, I really can’t see how the book is anything but tragic (although, I would allow that to be qualified with 'pathetic'). And this may be one of the reasons why a lot of the poetry is so damn-awful good.

165

An orange moon upon a placid sea
glistened for criminal Henry's fiery arm
fractured in the humerus:
no joke to Henry, nothing humorous
about his broken, he loved emptily
the rest of his body, warm

but not too warm, like this delinquent member,
His fingers wiggle, wiggle too his toes
like a sound person's.
He found himself okay, save for dispersings
of pain across his gross shaft, hard as blows
that in deep woods fell timber.

O prostrate body, busy with your break,
false tissue forming, striving to recover,
when will you make do like the moon
cold on a placed sea, with three limbs, take
the other for a cruise, like an elderly lover
not expecting much.


166

I have strained everything except my ears,
he marvelled to himself: and they're too dull--
owing to one childhood illness--
outward, for strain; inward, too smooth & fierce
for painful strain as back at the onset, yes
when Henry keen & viable

began to poke his head from Venus' foam
toward the grand shore, where all them ears would be
if any.
Thus his art started. Thus he ran from home
toward home, forsaking too withal his mother
in the almost unbearable smother.

He strained his eyes, his brain, his nervous system,
for a beginning; cracked an ankle & arm;
it cannot well be denied
that nearly all the rest of him came to harm
too... Only his ears sat with his theme
in the splices of his pride.