Free Berryman’s Sonnets by John Berryman

INTRODUCTION
    by April Bernard
    Why sonnets? Why on earth, in the middle of the twentieth century, a sonnet sequence?
    In the case of John Berryman, the turning to sonnets, and more specifically, love sonnets, is completely of a piece with the nature of the personal crisis that prompted them. He was in his thirties; he had been contentedly married for several years; he was happily—and for him, luckily—teaching literature at Princeton. And then, out of the blue, inconveniently—and almost from the first, evidently un luckily—he fell in love with a young woman who was the wife of a colleague.
    To a writer as self-scrutinizing as Berryman, this was a wonderful, terrifying, and guilty predicament. It was also a familiar one, at least literarily. The history of lyric poetry is, among other things, a history of passionate folly; and the best chronicles of this folly are to be found in sonnets. From the original fourteenth-century Canzoniere of Petrarch, to Petrarch’s Elizabethan translators and emulators, to nineteenth-century writers as diverse as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Meredith, poets have told their tales of joy and pain, longing and doubt, praise and blame, in the story form of multiple sonnets. Functioning as a stanza in the long poem that is the sequence, each sonnet in itself, a powerfully knit, compact fourteen lines, is also designed to stand alone. Over the course of many such sonnets, a story about love unfolds along with a story about poetry as the sonnets converse with one another by repeating tropes, repeating rhymes, returning to themes with variations.
    When Berryman embarked on these sonnets, he was already in the midst of his affair. Many of the early poems are explicitly addressed to the beloved, to “Lise,” as he would later rename her for public eyes. In these first private envoys he writes to dazzle, to praise, and to persuade.
    This morning groping your hand moaning your name
    I heard distinctly drip . . somewhere . . and see
    Coiled in our joys flicker a tongue again,
    The fall of your hair a cascade of white flame. (#3)
    Great citadels whereon the gold sun falls
    Miss you O Lise sequestered to the West
    Which wears you Mayday lily at its breast [ … ] (#9)
    But to be writing sonnets, and discovering that he was writing more than just a few, must also have disquieted the poet. It is a given of the love sonnet sequence that it ends , and not happily—if not in the death of the beloved, in any case in severed or unsatisfied love. Petrarch’s “Laura” dies; Sidney’s “Stella” rejects him; Shakespeare’s two loves, the “fair young man” and the “dark lady,” betray and disappoint; and even Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese ends pro forma with the dismissal of the lover as the speaker embraces death—although, as everyone knows, in “real life” the poet found her happier ending. (The only prominent exception to this rule is Spenser’s Amoretti , which culminates in marriage.) We can feel Berryman’s tense relationship with his own enterprise in some of the later poems here:
    How can we know with whom we ride, or soon
    Or later, ever? You . . what are yóu like?
    A topic’s occupied me months, month’s mind. (#91)
    Berryman seems willfully to be prolonging the production of these sonnets, as if the next one—like the next rendezvous with the beloved—might turn the tide of the narrative.
    In 1967, some twenty years after these poems were first written, Berryman gathered them together, ordered them, and wrote a few additional poems to fill out the sequence. He called them Berryman’s Sonnets. * The title offers the winking suggestion that “Berryman” is a character, both the poet and not the poet (as Henry in the Dream Songs is, and is not, Berryman). By naming himself as a character, Berryman also offers in his title the first linkage of his sequence with the one he most closely models it on—Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella.
    Berryman’s verse is