John Berryman. Photograph: Terrence Spencer
The Dream Songs published here for the first time are taken from Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, a volume of John Berryman’s uncollected Dream Songs, edited by me, which will be published in December 2025 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Surprisingly, hundreds of Berryman’s uncollected poems have been available for publication for decades, now—their existence was mentioned by John Haffenden in the introduction to the posthumous volume of Berryman’s poetry he edited, Henry’s Fate (1977). Re-reading that introduction in 2023, I found myself amazed that the poems had yet to be collected. So, at the suggestion of Chris Richards, who edited my memoir, I asked FSG chairman Jonathan Galassi whether I might take a crack at editing them, and here we are. There are many non-Dream Song poems yet to be collected, but Only Sing begins to answer a need I suspect many readers feel.
—Shane McCrae
30 August 2025
New York City
Whose life grew chilly, Henry drummed & sang.
I will not swear a smidgin’s happiness
laved his bleak eyes
no least hope made burn his ears, beckoned in vain
sleep infinitely back & far.
Several come very early.
Among the lime-trees grand, & chestnuts, at dusk,
he booted waites, bejewelled, pacing
when will she come?
Under a groined arch, medieval Jew,
He waits as he was told, old, past curfew,
when will they come?
O felix culpa! for then Henry came,
who never could have made himself a man of Eden.
So
hoarfrost, child of the sky
Tom: tom.
Good morning, good morning.
It all came sitting down & nearly for us did.
That would come to make us fight for breath,
the beginning of the end:
They’ll write I threw a vicious schedule of my friend,
was Pompeii worth knocking out, odd sighed
the hands with Patroclos’ death
Can he respond sincerely to the lost epiphanies?
That’s hard. We’re hard. We’ll see you at Camp Four,
Simmons & Blakeney are ill.
Henry was ill who went absurdly on, please,
and being the Captain, they shuddered & did his will.
Butterflies by the score,
casing the joint of cliffs & camp came once to the scamp
& hovered out of range. The doctor ‘Mine’
shouted & went down the slope.
I hunts & scrounge. Forget anything said in camp,
men can go, either way, in the flumes or in the high snows
where water tastes like wine.
I’m tugging with Ted’s ghost, wrestling in a pal’s way
with Cal’s self, for prizes which never mind.
Henry seems to have exhausted his vein,
which never mind, Henry, in the dark of day.
The time’s come when there calls no more to say.
The spinal tap failed. Now the brain.
Now below the cerebellum lies a giant,
a massive tumor, there since the poor man’s birth,
suddenly & blindly increasing.
Portends it what we know not. Facts are scant
and raves around its orbit the mad earth
where good affairs are ceasing.
Affairs end. I see that. Death is a history
instead of an event. I see that,
Henry growing fat
having lost care for all which mystery
Henry around his dogdom keeps cat
A black dress, a blue bowl.
The applause of the world comes to an empty heart,
sure the man is thinking now of something else,
something else, a fearless end
‘I have lost, of course, the fear of death’, BUT.
Messages enchant me, as from Ireland
I am an old middle-aged man about to do his best
I love old men
The bartender did just call me ‘my friend’
I say the wonder is these busy caves
explored by men, & then by men, & then
by cold & dismal
engineers, are so costless
Deep in the angels let the good coat come
& I will wheedle home, who misséd you,
I can’t fix him. He’ll go down there apart,
that would be the wicked part of him that falls.
Henry has in Ireland no friend.
Alone, in the half-dark
In the living-room of slaughtered children’s beasts, Henry
sat alert like a squirrel & chittered & bragged.
Slowly dusk came.
The radioactivity was fierce. The sea
roared on its antique coasts, away from home.
Slovenly Henry lagged.
Fish are weirder. Fish from South America
east head, toward the rift the grand rift of Gibraltar.
How do they know it’s there?
Some set a boat down in their midst & then
diverged slightly. Fish are friendly & went along briefly.
How do they know it’s there?
Foul animals follow me gristly & askew.
Tigers dismay may, so I back down to
the institutional slouch
slid ouch!: them seas was Barbarossa:
I hurt myself, perhaps, all the was to the end,
myself I hurt. Then I mend.
The baby wails & runs.—Go ahead, Mr Bones,
complain, man’s only father.—It’s Christmas,
I was thinking of the other one, friend,
the more mysterious, with his open end
onward beyond his hidden life & year in the sun,
all the surprising things he done
and more surprising said—almost ‘most,’ not more—
and most surprising thought. I was thinking of that.
—Okay, Mr Bones.
—He held we live: the babe weak as a cat,
the old man with faculties that pour
hourly, hourly out,
and he held our Father cares, when manifest
indifference or malice rules our doing
and undoing, friend.
Now these are strange opinions, self-confessed,
from an ex-baby. He also held our ruin
or saving is at hand.
