Speed

High speed internet has recently come into my life, and with that Youtube. So I post a clip of John Berryman reading Dream Song 29:


There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.




The body language in the clip is fascinating, especially Berryman's conducting of the poem with his long index finger. The liquid quality of his body (is he drunk?) and the angles at which he sets his chin.

The ending is justly famous, and now, looking at it again, I see how the whole poem works to point a finger at that secret guilt that some of us (all of us?) are hobbled by. That we have committed an irremediable wrong, and yet we don't know what is is; there is no evidence. And yet, inside, we are wrung. The heart is squashed.

Somewhere Robert Pinsky makes a distinction between guilt and shame, but he doesn't quite articulate the qualities of the difference. Berryman, I suppose, is talking about guilt, as the ending makes clear. But I can't tell which of these I feel. Perhaps both.