Rated a distinguished American narrative by critic Edmund Wilson, The Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956) surprises the reader by its engaging conversation between people born more than three centuries apart. By dissociating into wrangling voices, he traces the character and history of a literary ancestor, Anne Bradstreet, a fellow anomaly stalked by loss and failure. Introduced in stanzas 1 through 4, the poet establishes his identification with the colonial poet, with whom he shares doubt, alienation, and hardship. Internalizing her barrenness alongside his literary and personal misgivings, he claims, “Both of our worlds unhanded us.”
Stanza 17 opens on Bradstreet, who mourns, “no child stirs / under my withering heart.” In straightforward diction suited to confession or journal, she continues her plaint, which swells to high drama in stanza 19 with an eerily erotic birthing scene. Wracked with staccato bursts of caesura, it demands, “No. No. Yes!” then bears down as the child is born. Her emotion outdistances syntax in the next stave, forcing her to admit, “I can can no longer.” The mounting adversity of “Mistress Hutchinson [ringing] forth a call” in folk assembly stages the dangers to an intelligent woman within a male-dominated theocracy.
By stave 25, the poet is unable to suppress a call back in time. He mourns, “Bitter sister, victim! I miss you, / —I miss you, Anne, / day or night weak as a child, / tender & empty, doomed, quick to no tryst.”
Her failure to “quicken” parallels an assessment of failure in his own start-stop literary career. The tossing rhythms, Berryman’s trademark, give place to a verbal aria in stanza 31. Verb-heavy, the piece resonates from close placement of action words—for example, “heavy-footed, rapt, / make surge poor human hearts.” Intricacies of language bandy layered implications as the speaker justifies why he can’t be Anne’s lover: “—I hear a madness. Harmless to you / am not, not I?—No.” Unsteady in his grasp of divinity, the poet-speaker debates with Anne the likelihood of salvation. The duet concludes with the poet’s form of salvation: keeping Anne’s memory strong in his verse.
Ambivalence characterizes the remainder of Berryman’s canon. The first of his Dream Songs, “Huffy Henry” (1964), modeled on the poet’s dentist, represents through an imaginary character the incorrigible naughtiness in a standoff against other conscious states. Alternately solemn and overconfident, the childishly disruptive self acts out desires, fears, and fantasies in a befuddling series of revelations set to a razzing syncopated rhythm. Less courtly than Homage to Anne Bradstreet, a reckless momentum fuels a pungent black humor filled with self-destruction. As though glimpsing himself “pried / open for all the world to see,” the poet marvels that Henry can survive betrayal. Atop a sycamore, the poet slips into Henry’s impish point of view to look out to sea, a symbol of untamed menace. His conflicted song, an obscure blend of sexual pun with despair, wonders at the emptiness of life and love.
The fourteenth stave of Dream Songs, “Life, Friends,” continues Berryman’s surreal study of raw emotion. In this immersion in boredom, he regrets the manic-depressive states of flash followed by yearning. As though arguing with the mother’s voice recorded in his mind, he counters her claim that bored people admit to a lack of “inner resources.” His dissociation of the dog’s tail from the act of wagging displays Berryman’s elusive dream states, where unforeseen disconnections from reality produce startlingly exact images. In this case, he puns on wag, an implication of brashness. The leaden tone indicates that, for all his dark humor, the poet is unable to halt a crushing mood swing.
In Stave 29, “There Sat Down, Once,” the poet ponders Henry’s pervasive sense of guilt. Linking words with ampersands and varying tenses within the line, he unhinges the reverie from time constraints to allow him to ponder a century of “weeping, sleepless,” a disordered state that Berryman knew well. The nunlike Sienese face, a still, yet cruelly accusing profile, reproaches Henry, whose inability to change impedes him from pardon. Lost in private thoughts, he is unable to locate any victims of his imagined sin.
