Wednesday, January 5, 2022

John Berryman (also Delmore Schwartz)

 

Poet John Berryman with his then four year old daughter. Photograph: Terrence Spencer/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

with four year old daughter

Dream Song 149

'This world is gradually becoming a place
where I do not care to be anymore. Can Delmore die?
I don’t suppose
in all them years a day ever went by
without a loving thought for him. Welladay.
In the brightness of his promise,


unstained, I saw him thro’ the mist of the actual
blazing with insight, warm with gossip
thro’ all our Harvard years
when both of us were just becoming known
I got him out of a police-station once, in Washington, the world is TREF
and grief too astray for tears.


I imagine you have heard the terrible news,
that Delmore Schwartz is dead, miserably & alone,
in New York: he sang me a song
‘I am the Brooklyn poet Delmore Schwartz
Harms and the child I sing, two parents’ torts’
when he was young and gift-strong.'

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