Free Berryman’s Sonnets by John Berryman Page A

filled with allusions to his literary ancestors—directly and indirectly, in his sonnets he also invokes Petrarch, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Sophocles, Villon, the Psalmists, and many others, including Eliot and Pound. But it is with Sidney—and through Sidney to their common ancestor, Petrarch—that he is most closely and consciously allied. The “plot” of Berryman’s Sonnet s follows that of Sidney’s sequence: passion sought; passion requited; passion delayed; and, finally, passion utterly thwarted. Borrowing one of Petrarch’s many tropes, that the beloved is a shining star, Sidney casts himself as “Astrophil,” the “star-lover” of “Stella,” his beloved “star”; in his turn, “Berryman” loves “Lise,” who also often appears to be blondly shining. In the joyful poems, she is the “unlikely sun,” (#57), a “Mayday lily,” on the sky’s breast (#9); her face is “sun-incomparable” (#77). “You shining—where?—rays my wide room with gold” (#2). She is also a star of the night: “Astronomies and slangs to find you, dear, / Star, art-breath, crowner, conscience!” (#66). In a late poem, he longs for “[t]he pallor of your face lost like a star” (#90). In Sonnet 14, the poet figures himself as a moth fluttering about “the porchlight” that is the beloved, in a similar, more homely, but still starry guise.
    Sidney permits himself to tell the reader about the difficulties he experiences in writing his poems; Berryman does this as well. Sidney’s opening sonnet recounts his hopes that by writing he can change his beloved’s mind, “I sought fit words … [b]ut words came halting forth,” he complains. That sonnet ends with the ringing line: “‘Fool,’ said my muse to me, ‘Look in thy heart and write!’” Later he claims, in a subdued and wistful line, “Love did hold my hand and make me write.”
    Berryman, in Sonnet 23, struggles with the too obvious, too well-worn word “love” before his final capitulation:
    They may suppose, because I would not cloy your ear—
    If ever these songs by other ears are heard—
    With ‘love’ and ‘love,’ I loved you not, but blurred
    Lust with strange images [ … ]
    Also I fox ‘heart’, striking a modern breast
    Hollow as a drum, and ‘beauty’ I taboo;
    I want a verse fresh as a bubble breaks,
    As little false … Blood of my sweet unrest
    Runs all the same—I am in love with you—
    Trapped in my rib-cage something throes and aches!
    Later, he writes, “I prod our English: cough me up a word, / Slip me an epithet” when he is searching for words to describe the beloved. In the resulting epithet, she appears, again starlike, as “cadmium shine” (#66).
    Like Sidney, who upon his dismissal from his beloved’s favor prowls, “exiled,” beneath her window at night, Berryman in Sonnet 10, and again in Sonnet 98, alludes to climbing a sycamore tree outside Lise’s house so he can look in at her. There are also numerous places in these poems where the poet has walked or bicycled somewhere for a tryst, only to be disappointed; in another, he jealously recalls hearing Lise sing one of her children to sleep. This sense of helpless exile from the life and home of the beloved colors these poems with some of their darkest, saddest shadows; Berryman here is as much an exiled son, a lost boy, as he is a lover. Indeed, he knows this, comparing his agony to that of Oedipus: “… only ἰού ἰού / Wells from his dreadful mouth, the love he led…” (#96).
    Double consciousness—the knowing ambiguity of claiming that one’s passion is uniquely wonderful, uniquely painful, while at the same time acknowledging that love is also, always, the same old thing—drives both Sidney and Berryman. To some extent, this ambiguity is built into the structure of the sonnet itself, here in the meditative, circular shape of the so-called Italian form. After the volta , or turn, that marks the break between octave and