The Last Prayers

DELUSIONS, ETC. byJOHN BERRYMAN 69 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

$6.95.

These are the last poems of a major American poet who killed himself in January by jumping from a bridge over the Mississippi. In some ways his suicide at 57 made no sense. In recent years he finally achieved some of the fame, honors and money he deserved, and he appeared to enjoy them. Among people, he was an ebullient man with a trumpeting voice and a long, bushy beard--generous, energetic, brash. But he suffered acutely from alcoholism and remorse over what he considered a messy, misspent life. He did not forgive himself: "At fifty-five half-famous & effective, I still feel rotten about myself," he wrote in one of his poems.

Though Berryman was a mature poet of far greater range and accomplishment than Sylvia Plath, the manner of their deaths makes some comparison inevitable. The most arresting similarity is a common rage and mourning for the loss of a father in childhood. Apparently there is no healing this deep, mysterious psychic wound, and Berryman's complaint is harsher than Plath's. Her father succumbed to disease; his shot himself. "When will indifference come," he pleaded in Dream Songs.

I'd like to ...

ax the casket open ha

to see just how he's taking it, which

he sought so hard.

Increasingly, Berryman's work has shown a desperate man. In Delusions he reached the terminal realization that for him nothing was going to work --not love or fame, children or friends, not God himself. The best poems are religious. Brought up in the Roman Catholic Church, Berryman left it early, only to return in his last years, partly because his third wife, Kate, was Catholic. Instead of consolation he found God a heavy burden. Contemplation became an obsessive examination of conscience.

Vanity! hog-vanity, ape-lust slimed half my blue day . . .

his great commands have reached me here--to love my

enemy as I love me--which is quite out of

the question! and worse still, to love You with my

whole mind . . .

These poems are the more powerful because of their astonishing directness. Berryman had by this point mastered the technical problems in projecting his tense, lonely, anguished voice. As a young man he wrote impeccable poems that sounded just like Yeats. In his 40s he established his own sound in the loose series of hundreds of "dream songs" in which an alter ego named Henry spoke the author's mind in slangy, staccato rhythms. Henry appears in some of this collection, but Berryman had moved away from songs to these final, racked prayers.

Occasionally the earlier, more resilient Berryman still surfaces. There is a wonderful bravura hymn to Beethoven; a hymn to a Minnesota Thanksgiving feast that ends with a hearty "Yippee"; bouquets tossed at Frost and his drinking pal Dylan Thomas, and moments of tenderness toward his wife. But the dominant tone is cold despair. One of the last poems recalls a night spent at Critic Richard Blackmur's house in Maine.

Off the coast was an island, P'lit

Manaan, the bluff from Richard's lawn was

almost sheer.

A chill at four o'clock . . . it occurred to me that one night, instead of warm

pajamas,

I'd take off all my clothes & cross

the damp cold lawn & down the

bluff into the terrible water & walk

forever under it out toward the island.

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