10/26/2026
Today we note the birth date of John Berryman (October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972), American poet and scholar.
He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional" school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs.
When Berryman was eleven years old, his father shot and killed himself. Berryman was haunted by his father's death for the rest of his life and would later write about his struggle to come to terms with it in much of his poetry.
The Dream Songs is a compilation of two books of poetry, 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968). In total, the work consists of 385 individual poems.
These portray “Henry,” an anguished and often-deranged character very much like Berryman. Made up of three six-line stanzas that teem with allusions to past and present events and to literary figures, The Dream Songs display a variety of poetic resources that include slangy diction and a nervous, fractured syntax.
The book is listed by the American Academy of Poets as one of its Groundbreaking Books of the 20th century. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry calls The Dream Songs "[Berryman's] major work".
Berryman’s lifelong struggles with alcoholism and depression ended in 1972, when he jumped off a Minneapolis bridge in the dead of winter.
Here are three poems by John Berryman for your consideration:
Eleven Addresses to the Lord [Section 1)
1
Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake,
inimitable contriver,
endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon,
thank you for such as it is my gift.
I have made up a morning prayer to you
containing with precision everything that most matters.
‘According to Thy will’ the thing begins.
It took me off & on two days. It does not aim at eloquence.
You have come to my rescue again & again
in my impassable, sometimes despairing years.
You have allowed my brilliant friends to destroy themselves
and I am still here, severely damaged, but functioning.
Unknowable, as I am unknown to my guinea pigs:
how can I ‘love’ you?
I only as far as gratitude & awe
confidently & absolutely go.
I have no idea whether we live again.
It doesn’t seem likely
from either the scientific or the philosophical point of view
but certainly all things are possible to you,
and I believe as fixedly in the Resurrection-appearances to Peter & to Paul
as I believe I sit in this blue chair.
Only that may have been a special case
to establish their initiatory faith.
Whatever your end may be, accept my amazement.
May I stand until death forever at attention
for any your least instruction or enlightenment.
I even feel sure you will assist me again, Master of insight & beauty.
--John Berryman
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Surviving Love
The clapper hovers, but why run so hard?
What he wants, has, -- more than will make him ease;
No god calls down, -- he’s not been on his knees
This man, for years, and he is off his guard.
What then does he dream of
Sweating through day! –-Surviving love.
Cold he knows he comes, once in the dark,
All that waste of cold, leaving all cold
Behind him hearts, forgotten when he’s tolled,
His books are split and sold, the pencil mark
He made erased, his wife
Gone brave and quick to her new life.
And so he spins to find out something warm
To think on when the glaze fastens his eyes
And he begins to freeze. He slows and tries
To hear a promise; ‘After, after your storm
I will grieve and remember,
Miss your and be warm and remember.’
But really nothing replies to the poor man,
He never hears this, or the voice he hears
(He thinks) he loses ah when next appears
The hood of the bell, seeing which he began.
His skull rings with his end,
He runs on, love for love.
--John Berryman
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The Traveller
They pointed me out on the highway, and they said
‘That man has a curious way of holding his head.’
They pointed me out on the beach; they said ‘That man
Will never become as we are, try as he can.’
They pointed me out at the station, and the guard
Looked at me twice, thrice, thoughtfully & hard.
I took the same train that the others took,
To the same place. Were it not for that look
And those words, we were all of us the same.
I studied merely maps. I tried to name
The effects of motion on the travelers,
I watched the couple I could see, the curse
And blessings of that couple, their destination,
The deception practised on them at the station,
Their courage. When the train stopped and they knew
The end of their journey, I descended too.
--John Berryman
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Dream Song 14
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
--John Berryman
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Fare Well
Motions of waking trouble winter air,
I wonder, and his face as it were forms
Solemn, canorous*, under the howled alarms, –
The eyes shadowed and shut.
Certainly for this sort of thing it is very late,
I shudder, while my love longs and I pour
My bright eyes towards the moving shadow . . where?
Out, like a plucked gut.
What has been taken away will not return,
I take it, whether on the crouch of night
Or for my mountain’s need to share a morning’s light, –
No, I am alone.
What has been taken away should not have been shown
I complain, torturing, and then withdrawn.
After so long, can I still long so and burn
Imperishable son?
O easy the phoenix in the tree of the heart,
Each in its time, his twigs and spices fixes,
To make a last nest, and marvelously relaxes, –
Out of the fire, weak peep! . .
Father, I fought for mother, sleep where you sleep.
I slip into a snowbed with no hurt
Where warm will warm be warm enough to part
Us. As I sink, I weep.
-- John Berryman
[All poems from Collected Poems, 1937-1971. Copyright © 1989 by John Berryman, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC
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