Berryman's Sonnets

The poet introduces John Berryman and his sonnets:

He made, a thousand years ago, a-many songs For an excellent lady, wif whom he was in wuv.

Even after all those years (it's probably only twenty or so) he has to console himself with an unconvincingly ironic and playful mispronunciation of his feelings. She may indeed have been excellent, but the sonnets reveal that she was also inconsiderate, thoroughly unpredictable, a heavy drinker (perhaps alcoholic), and the wife of a close friend. It still hurts just to remember the lady and his responses to her. Berryman would like us to believe that it all happened when he was still a boy, not a lover, only a wuver.

Berryman is too precise a poet, too careful with his words, and too honest about himself not to have done this completely intentionally. His little statement about his "wuv" prepares the reader pretty well for the 115 sonnets it introduces. With the same accurate, often ironic, self-assessment, and with the passion which those two lines betray. Berryman set out to explore and compose his contradictory reactions to the excellent lady, his adulterous lover.

Another modern poet might have preferred a single long poem to examine and express his emotional contradictions (Roethke's The Lost Son), or perhaps a series of poems less restrictive in form than the sonnet (Snod-grass Heart's Needle). But Berryman chose a sequence of sonnets, a selection which is initially mysterious: a sonnetter inherits elaborate conventions of expression so often used as to seem, almost invariably, stale and uncommunicative to a modern audience. Berryman enthusiastically accepts these restrictions and puts them to work for himself. A single sonnet is particularly suited to the elaborate presentation of one feeling. In a sequence of sonnets a larger pattern of responses to a single intense emotion--invariably love--emerges.

So it is with Berryman's sonnets. Recognizing that a sonnet sequence was just what he wanted to write, he animated the conventions, utilized the restrictions, and made himself a sonneteer:

Also there was Laura and three seventeen

Sonnets to something like her . . . twenty-one years . . .

He never touched her. Swirl our crimes and crimes.

Gold-haired (too), dark eyed, ignorant of rimes

Was she? Virtuous? The old brume seldom clears.

-- Two guilty and crepe-yellow months

Lise! be our bright surviving actual scene.

But with Berryman's sonnets there is a difference. Lise, excellent lady, is neither untouched nor particularly virtuous. Crimes of adultery and deception have been committed. Nor is the poet attempting either a temporary seduction (already accomplished) or (at first) a permanent possession of the Lady. The affair is intense; its emotions range from guilt and despair to real joy and momentary hope. Berryman attempts to involve the excellent lady in all of that intensity and emotional chaos. The guilt and self-effacement, he insists, should be shared as well as the joy; after an octet's abstract discussion of adultery and adulterers, then--

. . . I am this strange thing I despised; you are.

To become ourselves we are these wayward things.

And the lies at noon, months' tremblings, who foresaw?

And I did not foresee fraud of the Law

The scarecrow restraining like a man, its rings

Blank . . . my love's eyes familiar as a scar!

The mutual involvement in the affair (and the sonnets) becomes more intense when the poet and the mistress ally against (hypothetically) skeptical readers:

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

If ever these songs by other ears are heard--

With "love" and "love," I loved you not, but blurred

Lust with strange images, warm, not quite sincere.

To switch a bedroom black. O mutineer

With me against these empty captains! gird

Your scorn again above all at this word

Pompous and vague on the stump of his career.

The poet, however, becomes the victim of his own exhortation: his rhetoric helps to clarify the futility of the affair. If he is successful, if he draws Lise finally into the experience of furtive and illicit love, he prevents the affair from ever becoming permanent. They cannot publicize their love:

If the rain ceased and the unlikely sun

Shone out! . . . whom our stars shake, could we emerge

Trustful and clear into the common rank,--

So long deceiving?--Days when Dathan sank

Quick to the pit not past, darling, we verge

Daily O there: have strange changes begun?

Those strange changes have indeed begun--when Lise accepts his argument. Their marriages intrude: he is jealous of the time she spends with her legal lover; she prevents him from enjoying his:

When neither my fondness nor my pity can

O no more bend me to Esther with love,

Gladden the sad eyes my lost eyes have seen

With such and so long ache, ah to unman.

When she calls, small, and grieving I must move,

The horror and beauty of your eyes burn between.

And so a pattern emerges; every aspect of his love for the excellent lady occasions pain. The tense pleasure of enjoying Lise crumbles into the grief of living with Esther. Lise, the lover necessarily shared, but temporarily the poet's alone, seems almost despised once she has been enjoyed:

Sigh as it ends . . . I keep an eye on your

Amour with Scotch,--too cher to consummate;

Faster your disappearing beer than lately mine: Your naked passion for the floor;

Dark as the Sundam Trench.

Their "incredible marriage" dissolves, then begins again as their more credible marriages and responsibilities permit. The antitheses and paradoxes persist and prod the couple until the poet, responding now to his guilt more than his love, seeks new solutions. One answer is simple; their spouses could fall in love with one another: "Why can't. Lise, why shouldn't theyfall in love?" But that never happens.

The secrecy, the frequent long separations, and the impropriety of the affair still rankle, prompting Berryman to hope "Sometime to dine with you. Sometime to go / Sober to bed, a proper citizen." The hope apparently becomes a proposal a decision to bring the affair into a more legitimate and more credible, context.

The results may already be obvious. Throughout the sonnets the poet's feelings oppose his situation; he is always aspring either to a more enjoyable or a less unpleasant state. The sonneteer seems doomed to an unrewarded labor. Unable to predict his next reaction, confused about the painful progression of his feelings, trying even to be honest even about his dishonesty--"for poets are eigned to lie, and I / For you a liar am a thousand times." Perhaps his most significant lie is the most implicit: he assumes the continued intensity of his love for Lise, judges his victory by the extent of her involvement in the affair. He succeeds, of course, in enticing her fully into skulking love: but then he discovers he must have her complete fidelity, which she apparently grants. Perhaps we should see it coming, we know him well enough to know, or guess, what comes next; but his rhetoric caught us too. We probably never suspected that his excitement about Lise would melt into spent weariness:

Most strange, my change, this nervous interim.--

The utter courtship ended, tokens won,

Assurance slated down . . . all this to stun

More than excite: I think about the grim

And dull and anxious, rather than I skim

Light bright & confident: like a weak pun

I stumble neither way: Hope weighs a ton:

Tired certainly, but much less tired than dim.

--I were absence' adept, a glaring eye;

Or I were agile to this joy, this letter,

You say from Fox Hill: "I am not the same."--

No more am I: I'm neither: without you I

Am not myself. My sight is dying. Better

The searchlights' torture which we overcame!