joej24
10-28-2011, 01:46 AM
Hi. I'm new to this forum and and also relatively new to poetry. I need help understanding this poem.
I think John Berryman is trying to show his struggle in trying to be unique as a poet. I don't completely understand all the images that have to do with babies and uterus es, but I think it's to show that everyone is born a certain way, and this is not good for Berryman because he wants his poetry to be different.
I don't think this poem is very well known, so here it is:
From Love and Fame 1971 John Berryman
Two Organs
I remind myself at that time of Plato's uterus-
of the seven really good courses I ever took
one was a seminar with Edman met at night
in his apartment, where we read them all
all the Dialogues, in chronological order, through
so that I got something out of Columbia-
Plato's uterus, I say,
an animal passionately longing for children
and, if long unsatisfied after puberty,
prone to range angrily, blocking the air passages
& causing distress & disease.
For 'children' read: big fat fresh original & characteristic poems.
My longing yes was a woman's
She can't know can she what kind of a baby
she's going with all the will in the world to produce?
I suffered trouble over this,
I didn't want my next poem to be exactly like Yeats
or exactly like Auden
since in that case
where the hell was I?
but what instead did I want it to sound like?
I couldn't sleep at night, I attribute my life-long insomnia
to my uterine struggles. 'You must undress'
a young poet writes to me from Oregon
'the great face of the body.'
The Isolation so, young & now I find older,
American, & other.
While the rest of England was strolling thro' the Crystal Palace
Arnold was gnashing his teeth on a mountain in Sicily.
An eccentric friend, a Renaissance scholar, sixty-odd,
unworldy, he wrties limericks in Medieval Latin,
stood up in the rowboat fishing to take a leak
& exclaimed as he was about it with excitement
'I wish my penis was big enough for this whole lake!'
My phantasy precisely at twenty:
to satisfy at once all Barnard & Smith
& have enough left over for Miss Gibbs's girls.
Thanks, Joe
I think John Berryman is trying to show his struggle in trying to be unique as a poet. I don't completely understand all the images that have to do with babies and uterus es, but I think it's to show that everyone is born a certain way, and this is not good for Berryman because he wants his poetry to be different.
I don't think this poem is very well known, so here it is:
From Love and Fame 1971 John Berryman
Two Organs
I remind myself at that time of Plato's uterus-
of the seven really good courses I ever took
one was a seminar with Edman met at night
in his apartment, where we read them all
all the Dialogues, in chronological order, through
so that I got something out of Columbia-
Plato's uterus, I say,
an animal passionately longing for children
and, if long unsatisfied after puberty,
prone to range angrily, blocking the air passages
& causing distress & disease.
For 'children' read: big fat fresh original & characteristic poems.
My longing yes was a woman's
She can't know can she what kind of a baby
she's going with all the will in the world to produce?
I suffered trouble over this,
I didn't want my next poem to be exactly like Yeats
or exactly like Auden
since in that case
where the hell was I?
but what instead did I want it to sound like?
I couldn't sleep at night, I attribute my life-long insomnia
to my uterine struggles. 'You must undress'
a young poet writes to me from Oregon
'the great face of the body.'
The Isolation so, young & now I find older,
American, & other.
While the rest of England was strolling thro' the Crystal Palace
Arnold was gnashing his teeth on a mountain in Sicily.
An eccentric friend, a Renaissance scholar, sixty-odd,
unworldy, he wrties limericks in Medieval Latin,
stood up in the rowboat fishing to take a leak
& exclaimed as he was about it with excitement
'I wish my penis was big enough for this whole lake!'
My phantasy precisely at twenty:
to satisfy at once all Barnard & Smith
& have enough left over for Miss Gibbs's girls.
Thanks, Joe