Review of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
by John Berryman
Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956
Editor's Note: This review originally appeared in the left-wing cultural journal Mainstream in its April 1957 issue. Mainstream struggled on after McCarthyite harassment forced its predecessors Masses and Mainstream to close. Masses and Mainstream descended from the well-known journal New Masses.
Now and again one comes across a poem which seems to have another and perhaps better poem inside it. John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is a work of this sort.
this is a longish poem of 57 eight-line stanzas, ostensibly a kind of "spiritual biography" of that Anne Bradstreet, America's "Tenth Muse," who was our first poet. I say ostensibly because, while most of the poem works out as a dramatic monologue, it is "disturbed" by a middle section, a dialogue between the living poet and the dead one, in which the main themes of the poem are developed.
These themes, to state them briefly if somewhat crudely at their greatest extension, involve human alienation: the failures of human love, the lack of God. They are dramatized as Anne Bradstreet's encounter with the New World ( which is not so new in its privations, its savagery, its soon-warring sects) and with the elements of her personal history. but the poem does not involve only the poet. The middle section contains the living poet's declaration of love for the dead woman; and it becomes an identification in which the conflicts and agonies of Anne Bradstreet are declared to be modern problems. The actions of the rest of the poem, then, the monologues of the first and third parts, although they deal with the dead poets and her times, gain – or are expected to gain – a symbolic value and a modern relevance.
These actions include Mistress Bradstreet's arrival in the forbidding new world, her love for her husband, the birth of a child, the loss of friends and loved ones, her sickness, delirium and death. Stated in this way, the poem seems simple enough; but such a catalog does not include those conflicts with her own sensuality, nor the struggle for religious faith and peace, which are among the most moving parts of the work. Above all such a synopsis does not suggest the immediacy of certain sections. What we have here is not narration at all but, for the most part a rendering of great intensity, as of something remembered. Here is the end of one stanza and the beginning of another dealing with childbirth:
I can can no longer
and it passes the wretched trap whelming and I am me
drencht & powerful, I did it with my body!
One proud tug greens Heaven. Marvellous,
unforbidding Majesty.
If the poem turned only on Anne Bradstreet wee would have had a moving portrait of the secret life (more imagined than real) of more or less public figure, a life that was tragic in that it had to be secret, and in the defeat of its passion by conventions and duty. But this is only half of the poem; the other half consists of the relationship of the poet (or of his voice within the poem) to Bradstreet and her life. It is here that we would expect to find the central meaning of the poem, in contemporary terms.
This is just what we do not find. Instead we are given a number of teasing references to contemporary circumstances and to the life of the "I" of the poem; and we are given his declaration of love for Mistress Bradstreet, and a longish dialogue where she faces this temptation.
Since this is neither allegory nor necrophilia, one can only assume that Berryman finds Bradstreet's value and meaning in the kind and quality of her suffering. She had become endeared to him by her agonies and limitations. It is of no use to ask a lover what is the "meaning" of his beloved – it is her being that is important to him. And it is not mere analogy to suggest that the same is true here. The agony of Bradstreet has been real enough to Berryman to have made possible the tenderness and the power of this poem; but the poet as not been able to give her any location on the general map of suffering. The few modern or personal references: "delirium of grand depths," "women serve my turn," the "reactor piles," the allusion (if I am right) to concentration camps – these are not enough to get our bearings.
Yvor Winters once said of a poem that it "was a rather good poem about nothing." He meant that the motive for the poet's feeling was completely buried or lay outside the poem he has made. I think that is true in this case. Anne Bradstreet becomes a mask; and the poem, I think, won't say what it is hiding. Berryman's feelings are manifest in the poem; but we don't know how to understand them because he has refused to give us a clue. The poem remains for us like a small and brilliant fragment from some naturalistic novel the rest of which has been lost.
A central interest of the poem (as well as an aspect of the quality of its terse texture) can be seen in stanza 35:
– I cannot steel myself God waits. He flies
nearer a kindly world; or he is flown.
One Saturday's rescue
won't show. Man is entirely alone
may be. I am a man of griefs & fits
trying to be my friends. And the brown smock splits
down the pale flesh a gash
broadens and Time holds up your heart against my eyes.
This stanza is itself a fine invention. It is loosened, more than one example might suggest, by off-rhymes, repeated rhyme words, variation in the shape of the lines, etc. etc. It is elastic enough to be lyric or dramatic as the poet needs, and it is excellent for all, or nearly all, of Berryman's purposes.
A beautifully made poem then, and a serious one (if perhaps a bit too dead serious), one that will bear a lot of reading and re-reading. (Some of the passages are really extraordinary and deserve much more quotation than there is space for here.) Then, with all its goodness, why do I have such strong reservations about the work? I think I can put it down to this, that the extension of the poem into its contemporary meaning is a lot more muted than it need be. It is true that the reader can, by main force, give the poem whatever extensions he/she wants (and paraphrasers will probably go on explaining the notes to the work with tiresome industry) but I am more interested in what is in the poem – or what, in this case, is not. Put it this way: as the poem stands there is, I think, too much (or not enough) Bradstreet in it – or not enough (or too much) Berryman. The real "possible" poem, which might have made it a very sizeable poem of these time, is in the middle section, I believe. And this section does not really work out, is mrred by that frigidity or inhibition which has foxed too many modern efforts.
So the poem is a limited mystery, but a worthy and often beautiful one.
