Content note: this post references a poem about suicide<\/p>\n
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I’ve found out why, that day, that suicide
\nFrom the Empire State falling on someone’s car
\nTroubled you so; and why we quarreled. War,
\nIllness, an accident, I can see (you cried)
\nBut not this: what a bastard, not spring wide!…
\nI said a man, life in his teeth, could care
\nNot much just whom he spat it on… and far
\nBeyond my laugh we argued either side.<\/p>\n
‘One has a right not to be fallen on!…’
\n(Our second meeting… yellow you were wearing.)
\nVoices of our resistance and desire!
\nDid I divine then I must shortly run
\nCrazy with need to fall on you, despairing?
\nDid you bolt so, before it caught, our fire?<\/p>\n
-John Berryman<\/p>\n
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For some context, John Berryman\u2019s sonnet was first published in 1952 in a collection of 115 sonnets, all of them about an affair he was having with a colleague\u2019s wife. Learning about Isobel Armstrong\u2019s theory of the double poem reminded me of his seventh sonnet.<\/p>\n
In Berryman\u2019s poem death is introduced first, then transformed into love. First \u201csuicide\u201d is what brings death into the text, but that phrase is quickly replaced by variations of \u201cfall on\u201d. By the time \u201cfallen on\u201d is used in the ninth line \u201c’One has a right not to be fallen on!…’\u201d the phrase has completely replaced any explicit mention of death. As a result, the language has become ambiguous, and as Armstrong argues, it is \u201csystematically ambiguous language, out of which expressive and phenomenological readings emerge\u201d from double poems (Armstrong 15). The language becomes even more ambiguous in the next line when it is taken completely out of the context of the suicide at the empire building with the lines \u201cDid I divine then I must shortly run \/ Crazy with need to fall on you, despairing?\u201d The inclusion of \u00a0\u201cDespairing\u201d points toward a use of \u201cfall on\u201d which is similar \u00a0to its function in the rest of the poem, but the lines are preceded by \u201cour resistance and desire!\u201d and followed by \u201c\u2026our fire\u201d all phrases which suggest a passionate relationship, a fraught and dangerous one, but not a miserable death inducing one. With the added context that this is a poem about the second meeting of future affair partners, \u201cCrazy with need to fall on you\u201d seems to be abandoning its meaning as a substitute for suicide and is instead alluding to the phrase \u201cto fall in love\u201d.<\/p>\n
The double meaning of \u201cto fall on\u201d as both love and suicide is impressively disparate and as Armstrong foretold, \u201cexpressive and phenomenological readings emerge\u201d from it. At a kind of meta level, the double meaning is either a critic or an exhibition of how language is so fickle that a single phrase can mean two opposite things. It is also potentially part of an argument that love and suicide are two sides of the same coin or at least more similar than one might think, since they can be merged together in a poem. I would argue, though, that the most \u201cexpressive and phenomenological\u201d reading which emerges, is that Berryman\u2019s love is a kind of suicide. This reading is backed up by biographical information on the back cover: \u201cafter several years of a happy marriage, he had fallen helplessly, hopelessly in love\u2026The affair was doomed to end, and end badly\u2026obsessive, impossible love\u2026Here is the poet\u2026as nutcase.\u201d By falling in love with this woman, Berryman is putting himself in harms way. If it is not quite death, it is something like it, especially since he is risking his marriage, which is meant to be the joining of two people into one. In this light, the women\u2019s request not \u201cto be fallen on!\u201d can also be read as a request for Berryman not to interfere with her life and her marriage, a reading further emphasized by the last line which states that she bolted \u201cbefore it caught, our fire\u201d. In a similar vein, the man in \u00a0\u201ca man, life in his teeth, could care \/ Not much whom he spat it on\u201d could be read as Berryman, and this line could be indicative of his lack of concern for the harm he does to himself or to anyone else through his affair. This reading could even answer the question of \u201cwhy, that day\u2026\/ Troubled you so; and why we quarreled\u201d which Berryman claims to know the answer to. Maybe the woman is arguing in order to defend against all kinds of falling on. Maybe, even before the poem is written, the \u201cright not to be fallen on\u201d is standing in for the right not to be accosted by crazy love sick poets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Content note: this post references a poem about suicide I’ve found out why, that day, that suicide From the Empire State falling on someone’s car Troubled you so; and why we quarreled. War, Illness, an accident, I can see (you cried) But not this: what a bastard, not spring wide!… I said a … Continue reading A Double Poem by John Berryman<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4708,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spring-2023"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4708"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}