The Heart Is Strange (15 page)
Read The Heart Is Strange Online
Authors: John Berryman
in tears—tears I invented & put there,
during our mystery.
24 June 68
I’m reading my book backward. It sounds odd.
It came twenty minutes ago. The hell with god.
A student just called up
about a grade earlier in the year.
The hell with students. And my mother (‘Mir’)
did the indexes to this book.
There’s madness in the book. And sanenesses,
he argued. Ha! It’s all a matter of
control (& so forth) of the subject.
The subject? Henry House & his troubles, yes
with his wife & mother & baby, yes
we’re now at the end, enough.
A human personality, that’s impossible.
The lines of nature & of will, that’s impossible.
I give the whole thing up.
Only there resides a living voice
which if we can make we make it out of choice
not giving the whole thing up.
Phase Four
I will begin by mentioning the word
‘Surrender’—that’s the 4th & final phase.
The word. What is the thing, well, must be known
in Heaven. ‘Acceptance’ is the phase before;
if after finite struggle, infinite aid,
ever you come there, friend,
remember backward me lost in defiance,
as I remember those admitting & complying.
We cannot tell the truth, it’s not in us.
That truth comes hard. O I am fighting it,
my Weapon One: I know I cannot win,
and half the war is lost, that’s to say won.
The rest is for the blessed. The rest is bells
at sundown off across a dozen lawns,
a lake, two strands of laurel, where they come
out of phase three mild toward the sacristy.
Epilogue
(1942)
Epilogue
He died in December. He must descend
Somewhere, vague and cold, the spirit and seal,
The gift descend, and all that insight fail
Somewhere. Imagination one’s one friend
Cannot see there. Both of us at the end.
Nouns, verbs do not exist for what I feel.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank April Bernard, Henri Cole, Philip Coleman, Jonathan Galassi, David Godwin, John Haffenden, Michael Hofmann, Miranda Popkey, Charles Thornbury, and very especially Kate Donahue.
Index of First Lines
The index that appears in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
A hurdle of water, and O these waters are cold
A is for
awful
, which things are;
(a layman’s winter mockup, wherein moreover
A thing O say a sixteenth of an inch
According to Thy will: That this day only
After a little I could not have told—
After a Stoic, a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean,
Although the relatives in the summer house
Amplitude,—voltage,—the one friend calls for the one,
‘and something that … that is theirs—no longer ours’
And the Americans put Pound in a cage
At twenty-five a man is on his way.
Aware to the dry throat of the wide hell in the world
Bitter upon conviction
Blue go up & blue go down
bulks where the barley blew, time out of mind
Canal smell. City that lies on the sea like a cork
Damned. Lost &
damned
. And I find I’m pregnant.
Dog-tired, suisired, will now my body down
Dream in a dream the heavy soul somewhere
Edgy, perhaps.
Not
on the point of bursting-forth,
Fearful I peer upon the mountain path
Feel for your bad fall how could I fail,
For all his vehemence & hydraulic opinions
Germanicus leapt upon the wild lion in Smyrna,
Good words & irreplaceable: serenade, schadenfreude,
Gulls chains voices bells: honey we’re home.
He died in December. He must descend
He was reading late, at Richard’s, down in Maine,
Henry under construction was Henry indeed:
Henry’s nocturnal habits were the terror of his women.
Here’s one who wants them
hanged
. A poor sick mind,
High noon has me pitchblack, so in hope out,
Holy, & holy. The damned are said to say
Holy, as I suppose I dare to call you,
Hospital racket, nurses’ iron smiles.
I don’t know what the hell happened all that summer.
I put those things there.—See them burn.
I remind myself at that time of Plato’s uterus—
I thought I’d say a thing to please myself
I told him: The time has come, I must be gone.
I will begin by mentioning the word
I would at this late hour as little as may be
‘If I had said out passions as they were,’
If I say Thy name, art Thou there? It may be so.
I’m reading my book backward. It sounds odd.
In my serpentine researches
It seems to be
DARK
all the time.
Let us rejoice on our cots, for His nocturnal miracles
Long (my dear) ago, when rosaries
Lover & child, a little sing.
Man with a tail heads eastward for the Fair.
Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake,
My intense friend was tall & strongly made,
O a little lonely in Cambridge that first Fall
O when I grunted, over lines and her,
Occludes wild dawn. Up thro’ green ragged clouds
Oh half as fearful for the yawning day
On the night of the Belgian surrender the moon rose
Problem. I cannot come among Your saints,
(. . rabid or dog-dull.) Let me tell you how
Sick with the lightning lay my sister-in-law,
Sole watchman of the flying stars, guard me,
Summoned from offices and homes, we came.
Surprise me on some ordinary day
The fireflies and the stars our only light,
The first signs of the death of the boom came in the summer,
The Governor your husband lived so long
The grey girl who had not been singing stopped,
The history of strangers in their dreams
The round and smooth, my body in my bath,
The sun rushed up the sky; the taxi flew;
The three men coming down the winter hill
The tree before my eyes bloomed into flame,
They pointed me out on the highway, and they said
This afternoon, discomfortable dead
Thou hard. I will be blunt: Like widening
Took my leave (last) five times before the end
Under new management, Your Majesty:
Vanity! hog-vanity, ape-lust
What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
Who am I worthless that You spent such pains
With arms outflung the clock announced: Ten-twenty.
Your letter came.—Glutted the earth & cold
‘You’ve got to cross that lonesome valley’ and
Index of Titles
The index that appears in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
“A Poem for Bhain,”
“A Point of Age, Part I,”
“A Sympathy, A Welcome,”
“A Usual Prayer,”
“A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away,”
“American Lights, Seen From Off Abroad,”
“Cadenza on Garnette,”
“Canto Amor,”
“Damn You, Jim D., You Woke Me Up,”
“Damned,”
“Desire Is a World by Night,”
“Despair,”
“Eleven Addresses to the Lord,”
“Epilogue,”
“Formal Elegy,”
“Freshman Blues,”
from
“The Black Book (iii),”
“Henry by Night,”
“Henry’s Understanding,”
“Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,”
“‘How Do You Do, Dr Berryman, Sir?’,”
“Images of Elspeth,”
“In Memoriam (1914–1953),”
“King David Dances,”
“Message,”
“Mr. Pou & the Alphabet—which he do not like,”
“New Year’s Eve,”
“Olympus,”
“Opus Dei,”
“Lauds,”
“Matins,”
“Prime,”
“Interstitial Office,”
“Terce,”
“Sext,”
“Nones,”
“Vespers,”
“Compline,”
“Parting as Descent,”
“Phase Four,”
“Recovery,”
“Tampa Stomp,”
“The Animal Trainer (2),”
“The Ball Poem,”
“The Cage,”
“The Disciple,”
“The Dispossessed,”
“The Handshake, The Entrance,”
“The Hell Poem,”
“The Heroes,”
“The Lightning,”
“The Long Home,”
“The Minnesota and the Letter-Writers,”
“The Moon and the Night and the Men,”
“The Nervous Songs,”
“Young Woman’s Song,”
“The Song of the Demented Priest,”
“A Professor’s Song,”
“The Captain’s Song,”
“The Song of the Tortured Girl,”
“The Poet’s Final Instructions,”
“The Possessed,”
“The Spinning Heart,”
“The Traveller,”
“They Have,”
“Transit,”
“Two Organs,”
“Winter Landscape,”
“World-Telegram,”
ALSO BY JOHN BERRYMAN
POETRY
Poems
(1942)
The Dispossessed
(1948)
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
(1956)
His Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt
(1958)
77 Dream Songs
(1964)
Berryman’s Sonnets
(1967)
Short Poems
(1967)
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and Other Poems
(1968)
His Toy, His Dream, His Rest
(1968)
The Dream Songs
(1969)
Love & Fame
(1970)
Delusions, Etc.
(1972)
Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 1967–1972
(1977)
Collected Poems 1937–1971
(1989)
PROSE
Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography
(1950)
The Arts of Reading
(with Ralph Ross and Allen Tate) (1960)
Recovery
(1973)
The Freedom of the Poet
(1976)
Berryman’s Shakespeare
(1999)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Kathleen Berryman Donahue
Introduction and selection copyright © 2014 by Daniel Swift
All rights reserved
First edition, 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berryman, John, 1914–1972.
[Poems, Selections.]
The heart is strange: new selected poems / John Berryman; edited with an introduction by Daniel Swift. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-374-22108-9 (hardback)
I. Swift, Daniel, 1977– II. Title.
PS3503.E744A6 2014
811'.54—dc23
2014004039
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eISBN 9780374713591