Happiness in Dream Song 14
Jonah Wilberg, 2008
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) “Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.” I conclude now that I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountain or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
This poem, characteristic of a certain strand of twentieth century literature,
presents a distinctive challenge to the thesis that good poetry is essentially an expression
of happiness. It appears to express a deeply unhappy experience, namely a deep boredom.
The boredom is deep insofar as it is all-encompassing. Initially, it is ‘merely’ a boredom
with life and perhaps friendship (given the syntactical ambiguity of the first sentence).
But the more fundamental object of boredom appears to be with certain aesthetic visions
of life. The second and third lines appear to parody romantic poetry, just as the “tranquil
hills” later on the poem “look like a drag”. But the poem not only expresses a boredom
with the romantic attitude towards life. It expresses also a boredom with “great literature”
and “valiant art” in general, as personified in the figure of Achilles, whose name is
deflated by being decapitalised, and whose exploits are reduced to ‘plights & gripes’.
Such boredom with the heroic worldview of great literature might be thought to lead to
the decadent, anti-heroic excesses of the Beats, or the poetes maudites. But no: even
“gin” bores the narrator.
Such apparently all-encompassing boredom, surely, cannot be thought of as a
happy state. But the crucial issue is what to make of the fact that Berryman, or the
implied author, has chosen to write the poem at all. Do not the very conventions
constituting the institution of poetry mean that when a despairing, or unhappy state it is
described, it is also at the same time affirmed, if only in its iron necessity, or in its
transmutation into verse, into what is presumably intended to be good poetry, or even
‘great literature’. In many poems of this genre, one might rest content with such a
conclusion: some despairing or despondent experience is implicitly affirmed in its very
expression, and hence partially redeemed, translated into a form of happiness after all.
The reader, even if he shares the pessimistic attitude expressed, finds solace in the fact of
its being shared by another, of its being thought worthy of expression in verse, of the
noble stoicism that lies in being able to accept such attitudes in the tranquil recollection
of poetry.
Dream song 14 is distinctive in that such a reading is blocked here. For the
authorial voice explicitly includes this very poem under the things that bore him:
“Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
Henry, one of the main characters in the Dream Songs, is said to bore their author, and is
explicitly compared to Achilles, and hence to the ‘great literature’ which bores him. This
rules out a reading of the poem as implicitly affirming, in its attempt to be great literature,
that which it explicitly rejects, namely great literature. For even such implicit affirmation
bores the narrator. We might seem to be left then, with a purely negative state of mind.
We are meant to avoid affirming the experience of boredom, as readers, since any such
affirmation is complicit with the stultifying tradition of great literature.
Still, this poem does not succeed in being a counterexample to the thesis that good
poetry expresses happiness. For one thing, in taking boredom to its extreme in this way,
so as to include boredom with poetry about boredom, the poems succeeds in being
paradoxical and ironical. The extreme and complex evaluative attitude evoked cannot but
give a perverse pleasure to its author and the reader. This is confirmed by the pun on
‘wag’ with which the poem ends: the narrator thinks of himself as mischievous, a joker,
because he ironises everything, including his all-encompassing boredom. So one aspect
of the happiness expressed here, is the happiness of irony taken to its twisted end, the
happiness of an intense self-consciousness.
Another aspect of the happiness finally expressed here lies in the fact that even
the “plights & gripes” of Henry, and thus of the poem itself, are said to bore the poet. The
poem takes boredom to such extremes that the poem is bored, ultimately with
complaining about boredom, and even with boredom itself. This boredom with boredom,
being unhappy with unhappiness, is ultimately a way out of despair here. The poem can
be said to express a happiness so deep that it is on the other side of the deepest boredom,
a happiness that acknowledges this boredom (which one might think is an accurate
response to modern humanity’s moral situation, as Heidegger implies in the Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics, and hence brings with it the noble stoicism mentioned earlier)
while yet transcending it, not only in irony, but by following out the implicit direction of
that boredom itself.
Once we see the ironic tone here, we can go back and re-evaluate the supposed
parody of romanticism in the second and third lines. Irony is never just negation: it is the
ambiguity of simultaneous affirmation and negation, and the boredom with boredom that
turns out to be the poem’s climax ultimately allows a return to romanticism, albeit with a
certain ineluctable ironic distance. There is a part of us that will never cease to want to
“flash and yearn” with a more romantic style of happiness, no matter how postmodern we
get; indeed the possibility of re-affirming romanticism, albeit in a new way, is one of the
possibilities opened up by postmodern irony and boredom, when taken to their extreme
limits.