“After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, / we ourselves flash and yearn” – John Berryman, “Dream Song 14” (lines 2-3)
For a poem about the boredom of life, John Berryman’s “Dream Song 14” is astonishingly rich in detail and nuance. One’s immediate reaction to such a poem must be, if life, literature, and art are so boring, why is the author writing this poem in the first place? Perhaps out of boredom—it is the product of a bored mind, unrolling language onto the page with an intricate skill that, however, it seems to deem useless. Alternatively, the author may be making a comment on human expectations of life and the world, and how our tendency to project ourselves onto our environment produces a false sense of our surroundings—a sense that the poem deftly deconstructs.
Whatever his intention, Berryman begins by breaking rules. “Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so,” proclaims the first line. From here, the author proceeds to do exactly what one apparently must not do, which is to say that life is boring. Berryman’s rule breaking permeates every stanza of the poem, from his oscillation between the word “and” and the ampersand, to his improper use of word forms. A mother speaks “repeatingly” instead of “repeatedly.” “Peoples” bore the author. The phrase “which bores me” in line 13 ambiguously refers to either “people” and “art,” or just “art.” The last line contains a dissolved, broken sentence: “me, wag,” all that remains of what was once a dog and a man and some kind of unknown connection between them.
This connection holds important significance. Throughout the poem, Berryman makes comments on the human penchants for animism and assigning agency. In lines 2 and 3 cited above, he writes a sort of explanatory sentence that implies a relationship between the flashing of the sky and yearning of the sea, and the flashing and yearning of ourselves. The coupling of a dehumanized verb in “flash” and a humanized very in “yearn” to illustrate the human process of anthropomorphism emphasizes an inherent instability. As Vermeule says, citing Guthrie, “We anthropomorphize because guessing that the world is humanlike is a good bet” (22). It is an adaptive trait. And, according to Berryman, it leaves one with false expectations of a decidedly non-humanlike world. The unfinished sentence in lines 2 and 3, which, by its initiation with the expression “After all,” ostensibly serves to justify the preceding line: “We must not say [that life is boring’.” But what justification does Berryman provide in pointing out the human tendency to anthropomorphize? On the surface, it would seem that animating the environment makes it less boring. However, the rest of the poem proves this to be a clearly insufficient explanation, and indeed, Berryman does not even end the sentence, moving into line 4 with: “and moreover…” The unresolved sentence structure hints at the unresolved point that has been made.
The poem continues to unravel in a similar way. The enjambment ending the first stanza results in a gaping pause before the phrase “Inner Resources,” which, while emphasized by both this prioritized placement and dual capital letters, is soon demoted by its lack in the author and a decapitalization in the next line. These inner resources may refer to the conceptual primitives that Vermeule discusses—our cognitive toolkit that allows us to view the world through a human lens. Without these devices, the author observes a dreadfully boring world, one in which literature and heroes have no value.
The final stanza completes the themes introduced in the first. Berryman writes, “somehow a dog / has taken itself & its tail considerably away,” attributing agency to a beast whose intentions can never be fully understood if they exist at all. Here, the dog joins the “mountains or sea or sky,” recalling the entities animated earlier. With all of these “taken away,” in effect symbolizing the removal of the humanizing lens and conceptual primitives, the author is left behind with a crippled fragment of language: “me, wag.” This ending may be interpreted at least two ways. By illustrating what life can be reduced to—mere selfhood and a meaningless verb—Berryman may be affirming his conception of the life’s essential boredom. When we strip away our human tendencies to animate and anthropomorphize, we are left with practically nothing. Alternatively, Berryman may be asserting the absolute necessity of viewing life through this lens, for the very same reason: without it, we have nothing to relate to, nothing to create meaning. The poem, like many of its sentences, leaves itself hanging. Its interpretation remains open for us to insert ourselves in whatever way we choose.
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