Dream Song 76
John Berryman Written: 1964 • Published: 1964
This is an excerpt presented under fair use for educational purposes. Read the full text here.
Nothin very bad happen to me lately. How you explain that? —I explain that, Mr Bones, terms o’ your bafflin odd sobriety. Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones, what could happen bad to Mr Bones? —If life is a handkerchief sandwich,
in a modesty of death I join my father who dared so long agone leave me. A bullet on a concrete stoop close by a smothering southern sea spreadeagled on an island, by my knee. —You is from hunger, Mr Bones,
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Curator's Note
Among Berryman's 385 Dream Songs, number 76 stands out for its raw agony: 'Nothin very bad happen to me lately. / How you explain that?' The speaker's fractured syntax and shifting between first and third person ('Henry') embody a mind in crisis. This is confessional poetry at its most unguarded—depression so profound that the absence of fresh disaster feels suspicious. Berryman's invention of the Dream Song form, with its flexible 18-line stanzas and blackface minstrel inflections (deeply problematic but meant to signify American pain), allowed him to explore psychic extremity. He wrote these songs as a man barely holding on; he would eventually succumb to suicide in 1972.
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