100 Poems to Break Your Heart Read online

  The second section dramatically picks up the pace of the poem. It begins with a sense of ritual, a return to the place where he was born: “Each fall the graves of my grandfathers call me, the brown / hills and red gullies of mississippi send out their electric / messages, galvanizing my genes.” The speaker’s dead grandfathers, now rooted in the ground of his native Mississippi, seem to be calling out and activating some biological code within him. This ritual feeling then turns to a particular reminiscence (“Last yr”) of hitchhiking home under the spell of addiction, which he almost “kicked” under the spell of his kin. He implicitly contrasts his life in the city with the world of his rural family (“I walked barefooted in my grandmother’s backyard / I smelled the old / land and the woods”). The soothing warmth saves him for a little while, but then addiction takes over again. He was “almost contented” because he had “almost” caught up with and found himself again. But that doubling of the word almost is painful:

  That night I looked at my grandmother

  and split / my guts were screaming for junk / but I was almost

  contented / I had almost caught up with me.

  (The next day in Memphis I cracked a croaker’s crib for a fix.)

  The last five-line stanza returns to the present tense. The poem circles back to the beginning, interlacing the warm natural imagery of rural life with the brutal reality of imprisonment: “This yr there is a gray stone wall damming my stream, and when / the falling leaves stir my genes, I pace my cell or flop on my bunk / and stare at 47 black faces across the space.” The speaker’s two worlds are colliding, summoning the musical refrain of the poem. He reiterates with new understanding his sense of identity and difference (“I am all of them, / they are all of me, I am me, they are thee”), but now adds a harsh recognition: “and I have no children / to float in the space between.” His own childlessness haunts him because he has nothing and no one to fill the empty space between his ancestry and himself. This enlarges the sense of solitary confinement that launched the poem in the first place.

  “The Idea of Ancestry” is a crucial poem of the African American family, but it is also relevant to anyone who can trace their lineage back only two or three generations. It is a poem of connection and disconnection, of imprisonment, memory, and freedom.

  John Berryman

  * * *

  “Henry’s Understanding”

  (1969)

  Henry is the ironic hero of John Berryman’s signature sequence collected in The Dream Songs (1969). In the first installment, 77 Dream Songs (1964), Berryman took pains to separate himself from Henry and treat him as a persona, a character different from himself. He always closely resembled his main character, who often served as what Richard Poirier called a “performing self,” but the separation started to relax and break down in the second part, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968). Henry becomes a very thin persona. In Berryman’s last two books, Love & Fame (1971) and Delusions, Etc. of John Berryman (1972), the mask slips entirely, and there doesn’t seem any perceptible distance between the character Henry and the poet who created him.

  At night I return to Berryman’s last, needy, grief-stricken poems. Lyrics such as “He Resigns,” “Henry by Night,” and “Henry’s Understanding” have a terrifying clarity and simplicity, a dark vulnerability and honesty, a wounded splendor.

  Henry’s Understanding

  He was reading late, at Richard’s, down in Maine,

  aged 32? Richard & Helen long in bed,

  my good wife long in bed.

  All I had to do was strip & get into my bed,

  putting the marker in the book, & sleep,

  & wake to a hot breakfast.

  * * *

  Off the coast was an island, P’tit Manaan,

  the bluff from Richard’s lawn was almost sheer.

  A chill at four o’clock.

  It only takes a few minutes to make a man.

  A concentration upon now & here.

  Suddenly, unlike Bach,

  * * *

  & horribly, unlike Bach, it occurred to me

  that one night, instead of warm pajamas,

  I’d take off all my clothes

  & cross the damp cold lawn & down the bluff

  into the terrible water & walk forever

  under it out toward the island.

  The title, “Henry’s Understanding,” establishes a third-person perspective; there is a clear demarcation between the creator and the main character. This sense of character carries through the first line, “He was reading late, at Richard’s, down in Maine.” Like Berryman, Henry is reading at his friend Richard Blackmur’s house in Maine. The second line turns into a question, which mimics someone trying to remember exactly when something happened: “Was he 32?” This question also changes the poem. By the third line the pretense of a third person or objective perspective falls away and the poem takes place entirely in the first person. This becomes an unabashedly personal or subjective lyric.

  The Dream Songs have a nervous energy and rely on a slangy, idiosyncratic lingo. The ampersands help create a quirky informality and offhandedness. Berryman’s signature style carries over to “Henry’s Understanding,” though here the colloquial language has a more plainspoken eloquence. Stylization seems to break down under the weight of feeling.

  So too “Henry’s Understanding” utilizes the characteristic form that Berryman invented for the Dream Songs. The poem consists of eighteen lines: three six-line verse paragraphs. It works like an extended three-part sonnet. Berryman often rhymed stanza by stanza, but here only the middle stanza of the poem rhymes (abcabc). The rhythm has a ghost of pentameter beat, which is dramatically foreshortened in the third and sixth lines. Isolate the third line in each stanza, for example, and you get the full effect of the end-stopped lines:

  my good wife long in bed.

  * * *

  A chill at four o’clock.

  * * *

  I’d take off all my clothes

  The terrifying premonition of this poem is that the speaker will one day commit suicide by walking into the sea. Foreknowledge doesn’t seem to help save him. He re-creates with electric clarity the feeling of being in a guest bedroom at a friend’s house in Maine. It is 4 a.m., and all he needs to do is put his book down and go to sleep. In the first stanza, he repeats the word “bed” at the end of three lines in a row—as if trying to convince himself that if he goes to sleep, everything will be better in the morning. But 4 a.m. is the pit of all hours, the dark night of the soul.

  Berryman uses rhyme to emphasize the end-words in the middle stanza. The place, “P’tit Manaan,” links to an essential figure, “a man”; the word “sheer,” which suggests that the bluff from the lawn was both steep and diaphanous, connects to “here,” meaning “this very place, this world, the present”; and the time, “four o’clock,” turns into the name of the exemplary composer Johann Sebastian “Bach.” The poet presses down on the decisive moment:

  It only takes a few minutes to make a man.

  A concentration upon now & here.

  He reverses the word order in the idiom “here and now” and thus changes its emphasis. The word “now” becomes paramount, and the phrase lands on the word “here.” It’s as if a certain moment in time determines a person’s fate.

  The poem turns on the word “Suddenly” at the end of the second stanza. The speaker contrasts himself to Bach, the great composer of spiritual joy. It’s not just that he is “unlike Bach” (the line and stanza break create extra emphasis) but that he is “horribly, unlike Bach,” who found salvation in music. The word “horribly” hovers. “Suddenly” and also “horribly,” it occurs to the speaker what he is going to do.

  Many of the poems in the collection Delusions, Etc. of John Berryman sound a religious note. They are idiosyncratic prayers filled with spiritual anguish and longing. But the conversion does not hold. As expressed in “Henry’s Understanding,” as in “He Resigns,” Berryman’s speaker wi
ll not be able to defend himself against his own alcoholic depression. And so there is a dark inevitability to the last stanza of “Henry’s Understanding,” a hopeless realization that he would someday take off all his clothes and walk naked across “the damp cold lawn & down the bluff / into the terrible water & walk forever / under it out toward the island.” Notice how the line breaks mimic the action, the plunge from “down the bluff” and the landing on the word “into,” the long hovering pause over the phrase “walk forever” and the recognition that he is going “under it out toward . . .” He is drowning himself by walking into the water but, as the poet A. Alvarez noted in a review, the tone is somehow open-ended. Maybe he will eventually arrive somewhere after all, some lost place that he had longed for since childhood.

  John Berryman was irreversibly damaged by life and obsessed by suicide. He passed on January 7, 1972, some three years after he wrote “Henry’s Understanding.” But perhaps it would be consoling to think that in some sense he entered the terrible water and then walked forever under it out toward the island.

  L. E. Sissman

  * * *

  “A Deathplace”

  (1969)

  In 1965, L. E. Sissman, an advertising executive, discovered that he had Hodgkin’s disease, an incurable illness that he recognized as “routinely fatal.” He was thirty-seven years old and thereafter worked with a palpable sense of time’s urgency. Chemotherapy gave him intermissions of health for eleven more years. But he had been “introduced” to dying, and from then on wrote ardently, incessantly, as if his life depended on it. His days were numbered (“numbers” is an old name for poems), and he numbered them in return. That’s how he emerged as a poet. Or as he put it, “Instead of a curtain falling, a curtain rose. And stayed up, revealing a stage decked in defining light.”

  Sissman’s first book was titled Dying: An Introduction (1968). It was as if his entire life had been a preparation for this honorable, somewhat formal meeting, which would spur him to become the poet he was meant to become, even as it drained the world of its substance. There is a breezy effortlessness to the epigrammatic couplets and flexible blank-verse lines weighted with earthly observations. Dying: An Introduction has a verbal gaiety, a joyous exuberance, a sense of fleeting grace undaunted but deepened by fatal illness. It also has the gravity of late knowledge, of memories saved from oblivion and held up to the light.

  Sissman carried the same spirit into his next book, Scattered Returns (1969), which opens with “A Deathplace.”

  A Deathplace

  Very few people know where they will die,

  But I do: in a brick-faced hospital,

  Divided, not unlike Caesarean Gaul,

  Into three parts: the Dean Memorial

  Wing, in the classic cast of 1910,

  Green-grated in unglazed, Aeolian

  Embrasures; the Maud Wiggin Building, which

  Commemorates a dog-jawed Boston bitch

  Who fought the brass down to their whipcord knees

  In World War I, and won enlisted men

  Some decent hospitals, and, being rich,

  Donated her own granite monument;

  The Mandeville Pavilion, pink-brick tent

  With marble piping, flying snapping flags

  Above the entry where our bloody rags

  Are rolled to be sponged and sewn again.

  Today is fair; tomorrow, scouring rain

  (If only my own tears) will see me in

  Those jaundiced and distempered corridors

  Off which the five-foot-wide doors slowly close.

  White as my skimpy chiton, I will cringe

  Before the pinpoint of the least syringe;

  Before the buttered catheter goes in;

  Before the I.V.’s lisp and drip begins

  Inside my skin; before the rubber hand

  Upon the lancet takes aim and descends

  To lay me open, and upon its thumb

  Retracts the trouble, a malignant plum;

  And, finally, I’ll quail before the hour

  When the authorities shut off the power

  In that vast hospital, and in my bed

  I’ll feel my blood go thin, go white, the red,

  The rose all leached away, and I’ll go dead.

  Then will the business of life resume:

  The muffled trolley wheeled into my room,

  The off-white blanket blanking off my face,

  The stealing, secret, private, largo race

  Down halls and elevators to the place

  I’ll be consigned to for transshipment, cased

  In artificial air and light: the ward

  That’s underground; the terminal; the morgue.

  Then one fine day when all the smart flags flap,

  A booted man in black with a peaked cap

  Will call for me and troll me down the hall

  And slot me into the black car. That’s all.

  The jaunty rhythm and rhyme in this poem seem kindred to the work of Joseph Brodsky or Frederick Seidel, a comic postmodern timing that suddenly swerves and plunges into something more disturbing. There’s something civic or sociable about the form. Sissman begins with a simple premise—“Very few people know where they will die, / But I do”—and then starts to roll out the iambic pentameter lines with easy fluency. He warms up by describing the three wings of the hospital, which he knows so well and gleefully compares to “Caesarean Gaul.” Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars famously begins with the sentence “Gaul is a whole divided into three parts.” The ironic description of the three wings of the hospital almost operates as a weaponized defense against the true realization that the speaker comes to in this poem. For example, we can almost feel the nasty, satirical pleasure he gets out of describing the formidable Maud Wiggin as “a dog-jawed Boston bitch / Who fought the brass down to their whipcord knees / In World War I . . .” The way he fools around with consonance (from “Green-grated” to “unglazed” and “Building” to “Boston bitch” to “brass”) increases the sense of playfulness.

  The first line of this poem doesn’t rhyme—as if to isolate the observation (“Very few people know where they will die”)—but after that the poem flies along on heroic couplets, which sometimes extend to three lines. The rhyming iambic pentameter, or five-stress, couplet was introduced into English by Chaucer in “The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women” and used for most of The Canterbury Tales. It has sometimes been nicknamed riding rhyme, probably because the pilgrims reeled off such rhymes while riding to Canterbury. John Dryden and Alexander Pope discovered that the closed form of the couplet was well suited to aphoristic wit. Sissman rides along and enjambs lines describing the hospital in one long stanza of forty-five lines.

  Everything starts to change when the speaker describes the entry “where our bloody rags / Are rolled to be sponged and sewn again.” One-third of the way through, then, the poem turns:

  Today is fair; tomorrow, scouring rain

  (If only my own tears) will see me in

  Those jaundiced and distempered corridors

  Off which the five-foot-wide doors slowly close.

  It comes as a surprise, perhaps to the speaker as much as to the reader, when the scouring rain makes him think wistfully of his own tears. He projects a kind of animal sickness onto the yellow corridors themselves, which seem both “jaundiced and distempered.” The doors close. Thereafter the nonchalance gives way and the tone darkens considerably.

  Now the speaker chronicles something more personal, emotionally closer to home—the predictable sequence of events related to his own death. We feel it as he begins to cringe while delineating the surgery, including “the pinpoint of the least syringe,” “the buttered catheter,” the lisping and dripping I.V., and then the “malignant plum,” his death sentence. The poem pauses for the word “finally,” and the speaker begins to quail “before the hour / When the authorities shut off the power / In that vast hospital . . .” Sissman captures the eerie feeling o
f a hospital at night. The power shut-off signifies the speaker’s approaching death. He details how blood thins from red to white, the color leaches out of everything, and the end comes abruptly. He doesn’t say “and I die,” but instead “and I’ll go dead,” as if the power generator has shut off in him too.

  Soon the lights go up again, and throughout the hospital the business of life resumes. The speaker imagines what comes next with uncanny precision, though even then he can’t resist playing with the word “blank,” which is buried in two other words: “The off-white blanket blanking off my face.” So too he captures the feeling of a “largorace,” which is to say a “race / Down halls and elevators” with a tempo that is slow and dignified, like the music for a funeral procession. Step by step, he pictures how he will be transferred to the morgue and then slotted into a black car by an undertaker. The poem closes with a matter-of-fact, resigned shrug, a simple two-word declaration: “That’s all.”

  L. E. Sissman carried on his anguished playfulness for two more books, Pursuit of Honor (1971) and Hello, Darkness (1978), a characteristically jaunty title for his posthumously published collected poems. His last poems show us a decent man, a good citizen, and an “innocent bystander” looking with relentless honesty and clairvoyance at the hard details and harsh realities of his own passing.