Friday, September 25, 2020

A Brief History of the Sonnet as a Form - Chapter 15 (The "Stirrings Still" of Beckett, Modernism & the late great one and only Berryman)

I have been to Italy and England as well as France and Germany. Let me now visit Ireland and America and Russia, in passing, via a Beckettian critic like me who is an expert on his poetry.

Samuel Beckett wanted the sonnet to be put out of action for a thousand years by some free verse Malherbe, in "Disjecta," in his thoughts on Irish Poetry of his time. Beckett himself wrote only one sonnet. A brilliant one, called "Dream", but he preferred straitjackets of his own making later and not borrowed ones, despite it. His sonnet is very Italianesque but does away with the volta. I discuss it more in detail in my book "Samuel Beckett's English Poetry: Transcending the Roots of Resistance in Language (AV Koshy, Authorspress, India, 2013, p 17-18)

Here is the sonnet for those who have not read it.

At last I find in my confusèd soul,

Dark with the dark flame of the cypresses,

The certitude that I cannot be whole,

Consummate, finally achieved, unless

I be consumed and fused in the white heat

Of her sad finite essence, so that none

Shall sever us who are at last complete

Eternally, irrevocably one,

One with the birdless, cloudless, colourless skies,

One with the bright purity of the fire

Of which we are and for which we must die

A rapturous strange death and be entire,

Like syzygetic stars, supernly bright,

Conjoined in One and in the Infinite!

A point I want to make is that this sonnet appears in a story by Samuel Beckett and so that has to be noted as an interesting departure for another use for sonnets.

Beckett's contempt for the sonnet was in line with Eliot and Pound and Joyce, the arch modernists who felt all these forms had been done to death. But strangely enough two of us who did research on Beckett's verse or poetry have both come up with sonnet forms, meaning Philip Nikolayev and me.

"A new poetic form, the "Immured Sonnet," has been invented by the poet Philip Nikolayev. In this triptych, three rhyming sonnets are "wrapped" inside another poetic text that is also metrical and rhymes throughout. " (https://www.facebook.com/SamuelBeckettPage/posts/a-new-poetic-form-the-immured-sonnet-invented-by-the-poet-philip-nikolayev-in-th/10151526341783131/) This is a first-class invention but obviously as in the case of Hopkins not many will follow him, as there is too much hard work involved in the lazy free verse and prose poetry world of today's "anything goes, bad English" poetry to create immured sonnets.

I invented the roseate sonnet. More on that later.

The point is the modernists wanted to invent totally new forms and content but they had not realized what Berryrman realized or I or Philip. Forms may change like my desktop at home I once had that I kept changing the parts of so the old one was subsumed away entirely by the new one but still it remained a computer. So too forms never pass away entirely, they only transmigrate through metempsychosis - "met him pike hoses" - or transmute or undergo transubstantiation. And John Berryman with his "Dream Songs" is the best example of this.

Dream Song 14

BY JOHN BERRYMAN

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,

we ourselves flash and yearn,

and moreover my mother told me as a boy

(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored

means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no

inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

Peoples bore me,

literature bores me, especially great literature,

Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes

as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.

And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag

and somehow a dog

has taken itself & its tail considerably away

into mountains or sea or sky, leaving

behind: me, wag.

Dream Song 4

John Berryman - 1914-1972

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying
'You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni.—Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.

—Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
downcast . . . The slob beside her     feasts . . . What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes.  She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
—Mr. Bones: there is.

Berryman attacks the traditional sonnet in a different way from Beckett, not by saying it should be put out of action, but by putting it out of action in a way by breaking all its rules, as now the stanzas have no fixed number of lines, though it totals 14, or rhyme or volta or even line lengths that are fixed and one cannot make out of this is metre or prose or free verse or even part of a short story with the appearance of stream of consciousness, dialogues, and monologue, interior, to use Berrymanian syntax. Henry is Berryman's alter ego but who is Mr. Bones and what are we doing with a sonnet sequence with male characters in it including the poet that stretch throughout them openly, brazenly, strutting their decadence or malaise of wanting only to entertain, and not caring for morals. Why do we still love it? Due to it making us laugh. Long live this kind of poetic, fictional, literary, self-mocking, wry, linguistic expertise in tomfoolery or buffoonery, and sonnets, modernity, sonnet sequences, Berryman, humour, Henry, Mr. Bones, and 'dream songs', as well as the lady eating chicken paprika. I must confess Berryman makes me while reading him lack "Inner Resources" and enjoy it, too, with no complaints from my ethical self!

Here is a last Berryman - one I found unforgettable given for the sheer joy of getting you all to read it and enjoy its quirkiness and lustful playfulness.

Dream Song 69: Love her he doesn't but the thought he puts by John Berryman

Love her he doesn't but the thought he puts
into that young woman
would launch a national product
complete with TV spots & skywriting
outlets in Bonn & Tokyo
I mean it

Let it be known that nine words have not passed
between herself and Henry;
looks, smiles.
God help Henry, who deserves it all
every least part of that infernal & unconscious
woman, and the pain.

I feel as if, unique, she . . . Biddable?
Fates, conspire.
Mr Bones, please.
”Vouchsafe me, Sleepless One,
a personal experience of the body of Mrs Boogry
before I pass from lust!"

It is aptly dream song #69! Funnily enough or interestingly enough, Berryman has a love-hate relationship with Rilke whom I spoke of in the previous chapter for Rilke's poetry, it being perhaps not down to earth enough! But we" know that he is talking of the person due to Rilke's biographers and what counts here is that once a poet is dead, we do not know what difference it makes to us his readers who he was if he wrote well, as we connect with the work and not the person and so Duino Elegies and his sonnets redeem Rilke the poet, to some extent, in our eyes, even if he was a "jerk". Besides, from his poems, Berryman does not seem cut from any different kind of cloth.

Rilke was a jerk.
I admit his griefs & music
& titled spelled all-disappointed ladies.
A threshold worse than the circles
where the vile settle & lurk,
Rilke's. As I said,— (Dream Song 3)

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_berryman/poems/12156

https://www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_international/2009/10/rilke-was-a-jerk.html