astonishment white as the sun

Honestly, i thought that the poetry-discovering days were over. Not so much because i've stopped believing in the power of literature to effect any good in the world (though that is certainly true), but because i'd thought that i'd already read most of the canonised Good Poets, and that any further encounters would result from friends' recommendations rather than personal exploration.

But yesterday, John Berryman quietly staked his claim to a place in my literary universe.

He's one of those deeply secular writers who somehow find God (or are found by God) against all imaginable odds. In the good company of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, perhaps even TS Eliot (but Eliot's is a less troubled faith). i admit to being fascinated by doubt. Or rather, i am fascinated by faith that exists in spite of doubt, in spite of the individual - faith that has somehow encountered what it knows to be truth, and because of that, cannot not believe.

And i swear i can hear Hopkins somewhere at the back of Berryman's start-stop rhythms, the compression of meaning in some of his lines.

Here's a sample of his late poetry, written in the years just before his death (by suicide - yes, i did say his was a troubled faith).


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from 'Eleven Addresses to the Lord'

........................... (4)

If I say Thy name, art Thou there? It may be so.
Thou art not absent-minded, as I am.
I am so much so I had to give up driving.
You attend, I feel, to the matters of man.

Across the ages certain blessings swarm,
horrors accumulate, the best men fail:
Socrates, Lincoln, Christ mysterious.
Who can search Thee out?

except Isaiah and Pascal, who saw.
I dare not ask that vision, though a piece of it
at last in crisis was vouchsafed me.
I altered then for good, to become yours.

Caretaker! take care, for we run in straits.
Daily, by night, we walk naked to storm,
some threat of wholesale loss, to ruinous fear.
Gift us with long cloaks and adrenaline.

Who haunt the avenues of Angkor Wat
recalling all that prayer, that glory dispersed,
haunt me at the corner of Fifth & Hennepin.
Shield & fresh fountain! Manifester! Even mine.



.......................... (10)

Fearful I peer upon the mountain path
where once Your shadow passed. Limner of the clouds
up their phantastic guesses. I am afraid,
I never until now confessed.

I fell back in love with you, Father, for two reasons:
You were good to me, & a delicious author,
rational & passionate. Come on me again,
as twice you came to Azarias and Misael.

President of the brethren, our mild assemblies
inspire, & bother the priest not to be dull;
keep us week-long in order; love my children,
my mother far & ill, far brother, my spouse.

Oil all my turbulence as at Thy dictation
I sweat out my wayward works.
Father Hopkins said the only true literary critic is Christ.
Let me lie down exhausted, content with that.



Vespers

Vanity! hog-vanity, ape-lust
slimed half my blue day, interspersed
soley almost with conversation feared,
difficult, dear, leaned forward toward & savoured,

survivaling between. I have not done well.
Contempt - if even the man be judged sincere -
verging on horror, top a proper portion,
of the poor man in paracme, greeding still.

That's nothing, nothing! For his great commands
have reached me here - to love my enemy
as I love me - which is quite out of the question!
and worse still, to love You with my whole mind -

insufferable & creative addition to Deuteronomy 6 -

Shift! Shift!
................... Frantic I cast about abroad
for avenues of out: Who really this this?
Can all be lost, then? (But some do these things
I flinch from some horrible saints half the happy mornings -

so that's blocked off.) Maybe it's not God's voice
Only Christ's only. (But our Lord is our Lord.
No vent there.) If more's demanded of man than can
man summon, You're unjust. Suppose not. See Jewish history,

tormented & redeemed, millennia later
in Freud & Einstein forcing us sorry & free,
Jerusalem Israeli! flames Anne Frank
a beacon to the Gentiles weltering.

With so great power bitter, so marvellous mild even mercy?
It's not conformable. It must be so.
but I am lost in it, dire Friend. Only I remember
of Solomon's cherubim 'their faces were inward.'

And thro' that veil of blue, & crimson, & linen,
& blue, You brood across forgiveness and
the house fills with a cloud, so that the priests
cannot stand to minister by reason of the cloud.



King David Dances

Aware to the dry throat of the wide hell in the world
O trampling empires, and mine one of them,
and mine one gross desire against His sight
slaughter devising there,
some good behind, ambiguous ahead,
revolted sons, a pierced son, bound to bear,
mid hypocrites amongst idolators,
mockt in abysm by one shallow wife,
with the ponder both of priesthood & of State
heavy upon me, yea,
all the black same I dance my blue head off!
...
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