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    Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
    Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
    Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

    By John Berryman

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    About this ebook

    This volume represents the first appearance in paperback of one of America's most outstanding poets, John Berryman. It contains, besides the long title poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, the major portion of Short Poems; a selection from The Dispossessed, which drew on two earlier collections; some poems from His Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt; and one poem from Sonnets.

    "It seems to me the most distinguished long poem by an American since The Waste Land." - Edmund Wilson

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 21, 2014
    ISBN9781466879577
    Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
    Author

    John Berryman

    John Berryman (1914-1972) was an American poet and scholar. He won the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs in 1965 and the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, a continuation of the Dream Songs, in 1969.

    Read more from John Berryman

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    • 4/5
      Fidelity, and dandelions grown
      As big elephants, your morning lust
      Can neither name nor control. No time for shame,
      Whippoorwill calling, excrement falling, time
      Rushes like a madman forward. Nothing can be known.

      This collection caught me unprepared. John Berryman unleashes the wretched roar of creation, all matter and ideas shoved gasping into our hostile world. The predicament is myriad. Survive, the poet implores. The Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is a peculiar monstrosity, the poet (narrator) attempts a dialogue with Anne Bradstreet, a poet herself who travelled to the New World in the early 17th Century and despite all manner of hardship cared for her family, bore children and maintained a poetic disposition in lieu of the gnashing mortality which surrounded her.

      The other poems are just as burnished --and brutal. Just remember, No time for shame.

    Book preview

    Homage to Mistress Bradstreet - John Berryman

    Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

    1

    The Governor your husband lived so long

    moved you not, restless, waiting for him? Still,

    you were a patient woman —

    I seem to see you pause here still:

    Sylvester, Quarles, in moments odd you pored

    before a fire at, bright eyes on the Lord,

    all the children still.

    ‘Simon ..’ Simon will listen while you read a Song.

    2

    Outside the New World winters in grand dark

    white air lashing high thro’ the virgin stands

    foxes down foxholes sigh,

    surely the English heart quails, stunned.

    I doubt if Simon than this blast, that sea,

    spares from his rigour for your poetry

    more. We are on each other’s hands

    who care. Both of our worlds unhanded us. Lie stark,

    3

    thy eyes look to me mild. Out of maize & air

    your body’s made, and moves. I summon, see,

    from the centuries it.

    I think you won’t stay. How do we

    linger, diminished, in our lovers’ air,

    implausibly visible, to whom, a year,

    years, over interims; or not;

    to a long stranger; or not; shimmer and disappear.

    4

    Jaw-ript, rot with its wisdom, rending then;

    then not. When the mouth dies, who misses you?

    Your master never died,

    Simon ah thirty years past you —

    Pockmarkt & westward staring on a haggard deck

    it seems I find you, young. I come to check,

    I come to stay with you,

    and the Governor, & Father, & Simon, & the huddled men.

    5

    By the week we landed we were, most, used up.

    Strange ships across us, after a fortnight’s winds

    unfavouring, frightened us;

    bone-sad cold, sleet, scurvy; so were ill

    many as one day we could have no sermons;

    broils, quelled; a fatherless child unkennelled; vermin

    crowding & waiting: waiting.

    And the day itself he leapt ashore young Henry Winthrop

    6

    (delivered from the waves; because he found

    off their wigwams, sharp-eyed, a lone canoe

    across a tidal river,

    that water glittered fair & blue

    & narrow, none of the other men could swim

    and the plantation’s prime theft up to him,

    shouldered on a glad day

    hard on the glorious feasting of thanksgiving) drowned.

    7

    How long with nothing in the ruinous heat,

    clams & acorns stomaching, distinction perishing,

    at which my heart rose,

    with brackish water, we would sing.

    When whispers knew the Governor’s last bread

    was browning in his oven, we were discourag’d.

    The Lady Arbella dying —

    dyings — at which my heart   rose, but I did

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