Why Poetics, Then?

Abstract

Why Poetics, Then? Daniel T. O’Hara (bio) I fell in love with “Dream Song 324, An Elegy for W.C.W., the lovely man” when I got to it in John Berryman’s modern epic The Dream Songs (1997, 2014) for the first time the other day. Henry in Ireland to Bill underground: aRest well, who worked so hard, who made a good sound aconstantly, for so many years: byour high-jinks delighted the continents & our ears: byou had so many girls your life was a triumph cand you loved your one wife. cAt dawn you rose & wrote—the books poured forth—dyou delivered infinite babies, in one great birth—dand your generosity eto juniors made you deeply loved, deeply: eif envy was a Henry trademark, he would envy you, fespecially the being through. fToo many journeys lie for him ahead, gtoo many galleys & page-proofs to be read, ghe would like to lie down hin your sweet silence, to whom was not denied ithe mysterious late excellence which is the crown hof our trials & our last bride. i The poem, whose rhyming intricacy is marked above, is titled an elegy, uses this episodic sequence’s nominal hero, Henry, sparingly, only twice in fact by name, and gives him, without the usual irony, the attributes of his author-narrator (exhaustion from overwork, for sure and most likely, also from depression and another hospital stay for alcoholism and abuse of his meds). Henry, however, is unaccompanied here by the minstrel figure, haunting [End Page 182] the many earlier poems, who tosses the nickname Mr. Bones back and forth with Henry and who, in blackface (as often Henry comments he is), usually evokes the straight man/comedian pair in minstrelsy that deflates every would-be sublime effect to the status of a pratfall and/or slurry travesty. Nor does the poem use smart-alecky diction, except, perhaps, when initially, with a tonal tenderness, he refers to William Carlos Williams’s finished life of poetic achievement as “high-jinks.” Merriam-Webster defines “high jinks” as “boisterous or rambunctious carryings-on: carefree antics or horseplay.” If there was any travesty in Williams’s life/work, it was for this elegy a sweet-natured travesty of good old American innocence, offered in its most innocent-seeming spirit: “you had so many girls your life was a triumph / and you loved your one wife.” Today, such high jinks—Berryman’s and Williams’s alike—would not be well taken. But given the period of the poem, early to late sixties (Williams died in 1963, and this elegy first appeared in the National Book Award–winning 1968 volume of dream songs, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest), a good reader should not be anachronistic. The seventeenth-century Scottish origin of the word suggests less a toxic masculinity than a sense of the agile and swift swerving responses to the chances of life. A dice game while drinking, the high jinks of the players depend on the throw of the dice allotting a certain amount of time to complete a task while drinking and before the time of the next round. Failure to perform here means a round without a deep drink. And we must remember that all these men, of whatever class, were also members of a clan and wore kilts. So, I find “high jinks” a rather perfect epithet, especially given both Williams’s and Berryman’s embrace of contingency, real and creative, along with a stiff drink, certainly for Berryman’s reputation, mostly all day every day. Similarly, the interleaving of this poem’s rhyme scheme, using internal rhymes and end rhymes, as well as changing the end rhyme scheme in the end, suggests that each of these three six-line stanzas, whatever else they allude to, also allude to the second part, the volta, the swift turn, concluding the Petrarchan or Miltonic sonnet, rather than the more mechanical and often weak tag couplet concluding the Shakespearean brand. Berryman’s dream song is a new poetical type, the infinitely antithetical lyric making up an epic sequence like...