Dream Song 14
John Berryman
from The Dream Songs
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.
(Poem begins at 4:24.)
5 comments:
one of my all time favorite poems, though i must say it does scare me some. (i've felt "wag" a couple times in my life) i read this poem with my students a few years back. they challenged me to find a happy poem for the next class. suffice to say, i had to dig and scramble.
I don't think life is boring but I love this poem nonetheless.
This is one of those poems that arrives in my head unbidden all the time. How I love it. I love hearing Berryman read it, too, though with all words that have lived in my head in my own interpretation, I can only think: John, you're reading it wrong.
I know exactly what you mean, Elizabeth. I hear this poem completely differently from the way Berryman phrases it, even though I love hearing the poem in his voice. We were having one of those afternoons: rainy day, both at our computers, both tethered to duty, duty, duty, and Mark said started saying the poem aloud. And for a little while the dreariness lifted.
Thanks, Gwynne! And Nancy, I'll take a dreary poem to happy poem any day. Do you think your students really wanted that?
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