“Nightmares of Eden:” John Berryman’s “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet”

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, n .º 10 (2004 ). pp . 57 -70 «NIGHTMARES OF EDEN:» JOHN BERRYMAN' S HOMAGE TO MISTRESS BRADSTREET PHILIP CüLEMAN University of Dublin «My harpsichord weird as a koto drums /adagio for twilight,» John Berryman wrote in the closing and title-poem ofhis first book-length collection The Di spossessed (1948).1 The image describes the stylistic or formal departures heralded by tbe book's later pocms as well as Berryman's sense of a contemporary American cultural Gotterdiimmerung, symbolised by what he termed a pervasive «American pleonexia» in his unfinished and unpublisbed essay «The American Intellectual and the American Drearn.»1 What he called th e «sluggisb influence» of the Cold War in a Partisan John Berryman, «The Dispossessed,» Col/ected Poems 1937-1971, 66. Ali subsequent quotations from Berryman's poetry are from this edition and wi ll be given in parentheses following the ahbreviation CP. In addition, referenccs to Berryman "s Th e Freedom of the Poet and Stephen Creme in this essay will be given in parcnthcscs following thc abbreviations FP and SC respectivel y. I wish to acknowledgc thc assistance of Barb ara Bczat, R ic hard J. Kclly. and Alan K. Lathrop at the University of Minnesota for th eir assistance in working with th e unpub li sh ed Berryman materials that are quoted in this es say. Pen nission to use those materials has been granted by Kate Donahue Bcrryman. whose gcnerous interest in Berryman studies is a godsend to ali scholars in thc fie l d. Earlier drafts of this essay were read by Duncan Doppelmann and Eric Haralson, whose in put l acknowledge. as we ll as thc comments of Kit Fryatt, whose assistance has been vital throughout thc wriling of this piccc. This unfinish ed essay is dated «17 Nov[ember] [19]4 7» and consists of threc a nda ha lf single-spaced typcd pages with pencil annotations. Pencillcd notes on thc typcscript sug gc st that the piece was intended to be used as the opening essay in a longer study, ncvcr realised, to be called The American Jntel/ectual. In his prcliminary notes Berryman indicates that the piece was written in part as a response to Mary M cCa rth y's essay «America the Beauliful: The Hum an ist in the Bathtub,» which appeared in the Septembcr 1947 issue of Commemary. From his notes it can also be seen that Berryman planned to show the essay to the critics Dwight and Nancy Macdonald before publishing it. lt was neither publis hcd nor revised for publication, however, for reasons that must 58 Philip Coleman Review symposium in 1948 gradually became recognized by Berryman as a see rnin gly permanent condition of Ame ri can culture, and in Homa ge to Mistress Bradstreet, first published in The Partisan Review in 1953 and reprinted with illustrations by Ben Shahn in a Farrar, Straus and Cudahy edition in 1956, the poet's uncertain feelings about contemporary American culture and its future were translated into «nightmares of Eden» (CP 141). This essay explores neglected aspects of that proce ss of translation and, contrary to the general tendency in Berryman criticism, reads his breakthrough «colonial poem» (Kelly 243) as a text that trenchantly interrogates the American self. In early April 1948, just before th e publication of The Dispossessed, his first major collection, Berryman wrote to his mother to say that, «After eighteen month s' thought, I carne this morning sudde nl y on the subject for the long poem I've be en drafting, and am elated; though it will be Fall at least before I can hope to get at it steadi ly .» (Berryman's emphasis; Kelly 228) The long poem was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, about which John Haffend en has claimed Berryman «was very fond of declaring it took him exactly five years to write.» (Haffenden 9) Berryman's letter to his mother, however, suggests that the poem was on his mind for at least eighteen months longer than that. Haffenden takes this point on board, to a certain extent, by considering the effect an extra-marital affair in 1947 had on the writing of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Nevertheless, sorne points regarding the poem's compositíon, and indeed Berryman's intentions, seem to be in cont en tion. Why, for example, did Berryman need to spend eighteen months thinking about «the subject» for a long poem if it had already been written about in a long sonnet sequence? That sequence -eventually published in 1967 as Berryman 's Sonnetsends with an epilogue (taken from the story of Samson and Delilah in the Book of Judges), which r ea ds: «Howbeit the hair of his head began to grow again, as when he was shaven» (Judges, xvi.22). The epilogue suggests that Berryman felt he had recovered, emotionally and intellectually, after whal was by a ll accounts a tumultuous affair, before he embarked on his next long project, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. As Sharon Bryan has argued, it is not necessary to read the po em as «a dire ct outgrowth of the Scmnets» (Bryan 147), no r is it incontrovertibly the case that Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is an extension of Berryman 's meditation on the themes of seduction and desire in the earlier work, as has often been stated. Indeed, the general critica) unwillingness to consider Berryman's Sonnet.1· -which was not published until 1967-as constituting much more than a record of the poet's first extra-marital affair has been paralleled in critica! evaluations of Homa?, e to Mistress Bradstreet.' rema in unclear -a lthough the essay's opening sente nce ( «I hale America») may ha vc had somcthing to do with that. ' Recen! accounrs of the poem hy Thomas Travisano and Edward Brunncr have sought to revise the parameters for rcading Ho mage to Mistress Bradstreet. Bnmncr·s bricf account of thc p oem ·s sexual politi<.:s is extremcly pertinent and points to a much-neglectcd area of Bcrryman scholurship. «Nightmares of Eden:» Jo/111 Berryman's Homagc to Mistress Brad street 59 One of the earliest commentators on the poem, John Frederick Nims, asserted that it was «really about» Berryman's «need for a mistress, confidante, co nfessor.» (Nims 126) Nims wrote that: «Üne might think the re would be more satisfactory candidates for this triple role among the living.» Haffenden' s influential account of the poem concludes with a similar reflection on Benyman's need for what he calls «a figure uniting mistress and wife.» (Haffenden 33). He reads the long poem as «a lament for a doomed marriage,» citing Berryman's break-up with his first wife, Ei leen Simpson, in evidence. Simpson le ft Berryman, however, only after the coupl e's retum to the United States following a trip to Euro pe in August 1953, by which time Berryman had completed th e manuscript for the poem and deposited it in a vault at the First National Bank in Princeton (Kelly 246). Berryman 's feverish immersion in the writing of the poem, in the later s tage s especially, may well have contributed to the failure of his marriage to Simp so n, but the poem itself involves much more, of much greater cultural resonance, than the dissolution of Berryman's first marriage. Berryman explores the idea that a literary work might not be reducible to a single event in its author's life in his study of Stephen Crane, first published in 1950, where he asks, «Who knows how many origins a deep work has?» (SC 79) «Football was more instructive, probably, than Zola» (SC 78) he writes in his analysis of The Red Bad ge of Courage, referring to an earlier critic's amazement at Crane's ability to describe war when he had never expericnced it firsthand. Berryman uses this example to emphasize the novelist's ability to record and extrapolate from a whole range of human experiences; Crane, he suggests, had «an ear like a trap» (SC 79). In short, Berryman believed that Crane's soc ial alertness, his keen sense of what was going on in the world around him, was crucia l to the development of his fiction. Berryman 's rccognition of Crane's engagement with social realities, however, has rarely commanded as much critica] attention as the quasi-psychoanalytical «primal scene» skctched by him in the book's final chapter, which has prompted one critic to read Berryman's study as «substantially a self-portrait», «the product of an irresponsible countertransference» (Clendenn in g 186). Berryman's Step he n Crane, in other words, is often read for what it purportedly reveals about the poet's psychology and personal life rather than for its engagement with broader social and cultural concems. In relation to Homage ro Mistress Brad street, such readings ignore Berryman's claim that it «is a historical poem» (Berryman's emphasis; FP 329), a text that engagcs the poefs sense of Cold War America as a «scene of disorder» as he would suggest in his elegy for John F. Kennedy (CP 165). In a pr ose piece written in 1965. Berryman compla in ed that critics of Homage to Misrress Bradstreet had «overconsider[ edl such matters fas the J extended witch-seductress and dcmon-lover bit», before goi ng on to describe the importance of his examination of «the turbulence of the modero world, and memory. a nd wants» in his major work The Dream Songs (FP 329-30), th e first .instalm en t of which ( 77 Dr e mn Sonxs) was published in 1964. The subject of « th e turbulence of the modern world.» howcvcr, is also central to Bcrryman's interrogation of the 60 Pllilip Colema11 American se lf in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, where he develops the critique of contemporary culture initiated -if sometimes poorly executedin a number of eariier poems, including «Nineteen Thirty-E ight», «T he Dangerous Yea r», and «Thanksgiving: Detroit» (CP 274-5, 278-9, 281-2). Discussions of Homa ge to Mistress Bradstreet. in terms of Berryman 's marital and sexual life ha ve directed critica] attention away from important questions co ncerning the strategic intertextuality of the poem and its twentieth-century interpo l ations, thereby reinforcing what might be termed the narrmv confessional approach that continues to characterise interpretations of not only Berryman's poetry, but also that of Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. Warner Berthoff, for example, has argued that «[t]he idiosyncratic voicing of Berryman 's Dr eam Songs [ ... ) traces back through Homage to Mistress Bradstreet in 1956 to a sonn et sequence written at the en d of the l 940s out of excruciating personal trouble» (Berthoff 34). By focusing, in the same way, on what B er thoff calls «the contours of prívate recollecti on», many commentators have ignored Berryman's cultural-political engagements in the poem and focused instead on the tum inward that is generally perceived as the dominant feature of confessional poetry. In an undated and unpublished essay erititled «Africa: Sorne Notes on Modern Fiction», Berryman suggests that: Few critics would deny, except as patriots, that a profound dissatisfaction with American li fe , by our writer s, is so prominent a feature of our intellectual history as almost to be worth considering characteristic. Somctimes it has tak en the form of impatience with America as an audience for art, sometimes the form of contempt for it as a subject, somctimes the form of personal dislike and rejection; bu t esse nt ia ll y it is one th in g, an anti-patriotism. Here Berryman reconsiders the political character of American writing, but he also signals the «anti-pau'iotic» element in bis own work that -with regard to Homage to Mistress Bradstreet-is more crucially concerned with exploring the relationship bctween America's past and its Cold War present than it is with providing a thinly disguised account of a !ove affair turned sour. Although the main topic of this unpublished essay is modern fi ction, Berryman clearly had Ezra Pound somewhere in mind when he de sc ribed «anti-patriotism» as a «form of impatience with America as an audience for art». Following Pound's example, indeed, Berryman leam ed that (in Pound's formula): «A work of art need not contain any statement of a political or of a social or of a philosophical conviction, but it nearly always implies one» (Pound 77). Bruce Bawer has claimed that «Pound was not the ido!» of th e Middle Generation poets, but Berryman's contact with Pound during the late 1940s was crucial to his developme nt (Bawer 123). Robert Lowell recalled Berryman 's gleeful adulation of Pound when both poets visited Pound in St. Elizabeth's in Washington «N ightmares of Eden:» Jolm B errym< m's Homage to Mistrcss Brad street 61 in 1948 (Lowell 113 ) ," but Berryman also conducted a correspondence with Pound in the late 1940s, one consequence of which was that James Laughlin of New Directions Press, at the bidding of «Ezra» himse lf , commi ssioned Berryman to edit a selection of Pound's work. In an unpublished letter, dat ed 27 June 1947, Laughlin infonned Berryman that «Ezra would like to have you be the editor for th e volume of his selected poems to go in the New Classics Series». In a later letter, written in August 1948, Laughlin ex plained that, « The whole purpo se of this book is to get people to look at Pound the poet, to clear their minds of Pound the wacky, or Pound the traitor». Although New Directions eventua ll y dropped Berryman as editor of the proposed selection, Pound himself considered Berryman an important young writcr and in an undated letter, pro babi y written early in 194 7, he told Berryman that he should «group and agree with 3 men, as to what should be DONE. directio voluntatis. Then get 3 or 4 more [Sic] ». Berryman, however, was not willing simply to be recruited a nd placed wherevcr Pound wanted to put him. Following a m ee ting wi th Pound in February 1947, the poet Charles Olson repo11ed to Berryman that: We had it out again yesterday: 'Damn! yr. / generootion mu st find its own ... 'Hang together or ... ·set up correspondence, commiltees of. .. (public safety ?) ... 'circulate letters, we did, London, 1912, Lou is Zukowski ... He badgers. Scz he: n ow Be rryman, 1 of 4, 5 serious. [All sic l. ln a later \etter, written in March 1947. Olson exp lained to Berryman that Pou nd «craves letters from you and a few more but he also wants you and me to make five with Allen, Spencer, West, and circulate letters, robín round or oth er wi se, among ourselves». Nevertheless, Berryman was unwilling to co llaborate with Olson on the project of instigating a poetry movement as proposed by Pound. ln stead, in an undated lett er to Pound from the sa me period, he named Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwart z, and Robert Lowell as hi s closest «Co ntemporaries». This is not in significant: by recognising Thomas, in particular, as a closer co ntemporary than Olson, Berryman made a small but significant contribution to the project of extending the boundari es of American literary culture against what Geoffrey Hartman has called the compulsive «purging [ ofj Europe from America» that has been at the heart of mainstream American cultural ideology sin ce Colonial times. (Hartman 11 9) In this sense, Berryman (l ike the Euro-centric Pound) was also a kind of «traitor» because he soug ht in his work to unde nnin e the idea of a «representative American se l f» that, as Sacvan Bercov it ch has argued, «For well over two ce nt u ri es [ ... ] subsumed the fa cts of social pluralism (e thnic, economic, religious, even personal) in a The Cuban po et Jos é Rodríguez Feo offers fu11h er evidence of Berryman 's ent hu siasm fo r Pound in a letter written in December 1948, where he describes Berryman as a «mad chap» who « recites[ .. . ] P ou nd wi th a sort of fanatical entonation [sic]». See Coyle and Filreis 146-47. 62 Phi/ip Coleman comprehensive ideal» (Bercovitch 1975 186). The perpetuation of this «subsum[ing]» and «comprehensive» national self-image was central to American Cold War political and cultural ideology, but many American artists of the period refused to accept its authority, from Allen Ginsberg and Richard Yates to George Tooker and Jasper Johns. In Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, Berryman interrogates thc origins of this idealised American self by focusing on the figure of Anne Bradstreet, the «tenth muse» or archetypal icon of New World or Ame ri can experience. Berryman discerned something of what Linda Hutcheon ha s termed the «complex intertextual cross-referencing» (Hutcheon 81) of modern writing when, in a discussion of Pound's poetry published in 1947, he said th at «Poetry is a palimpsest» (FP 258). Shortly after Bcrryman had completed the füst draft of the poem in April 1953, he wrote to bis mother that he had come upon the following passage in John Keats's letters: «The innumerable compositions and decompositions which take place between thc intcllect and its thousand materials befare it arrives at that trembling delicate and snail-like [i.e., sensitive as a snail-horn] perccption of Beauty».5 (Ci ted in Kelly 245) Berryman's reference to this passage suggests not only that he was finally bcginning to see Homage to Mistress Bradstreet in its completed form, but also that the poem was the result of an intense exchange between the poet's «intellect» and «its thousand materials». The reader of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is subsequently encouraged to become what Udo Hebel has called a «text archeologist» (Hebel 140): although, as noted, it is frequently regarded as an exploration of an emotional crisis suffer ed by the poet, Berryman's breakthrough-poem can be described in very different, less solipsistic terms as a text th at engages with American history and the Cold War crisis in the conception of the Am erican self. One of the sections of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet that has commanded a great deal of critica! attentíon is that from the middle of stanza 18 to the end of stanza 21, which describes the birth of Anne Bradstreet's daughter Sarah. The section begins with a description of Bradstreet's realization that she may be pregnant, in voking both her morning sickness and her desire to have children: «Unwell in a new way. Can that begin? / God brandishes. O love, O I lo ve. Kin, / gather.» (CP 137) Three stanz as later the «anguish comes to an end» with the poetess asking, «Is that thing alive? I hear a famisht howl» (CP 138). A typical reading of this segment comes from Joseph Mancini, Jr ., who presents Homa ge to Mistress Bradstreet as detailing «what [the Jungian psychoanaly ti cal theorist] Nor Hall describes as a 'palatial interior life, labyrinthine levels of meaning to explore, red niches to dig souls out of, and deep enclosures for his own not-yet-born'» (Mancini 177). Mancini concentrates on what the poem reveals about Berryman 's emotional lif e, his psychological profile, and the poet's psycho-sexual relations with bis mother, bis first wife, and bis father. Discussing what he calls Berryrnan's «wombly a rt », Mancini argues that in writing Homage to MisJress Brad st reet Berryman was enabled to «both inseminate the poetic egg and use his mothering energy to batch it» (Mancini 177). See Jo hn Keats. letter to Benjamín Robert Haydon, 8 A pril 1818 (Keats 128-30 ). «Ni¡:htmares of Eden: » Joh11 Berryman 's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet 63 This reading, while it proposes an interesting view of the poem 's composition, ignores important contextual issues that surrounded its publication, presentation, and critica! reception in 1956. Significantly, when Homage to Mistress Bradstreet was first published in the September-October 1953 issue of the Partisan Review, Berryman was not conlractua ll y bound to any publisher. In April 1955 Robert Giroux, a former classmate and friend of Berryman's at Columbia University in the 1930s, approached him about the possibility of publishing the poem with Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, whe re he would be among «friends», and the poet signed a contrae! in June 1955. The book, when it was finally published in 1956, won bo th the University of Chicago's Harriet Monroe Poetry Prize and a Rockefeller Fellowship in Poetry from the Partisan Review. As a further token of its impact on contemporary poetic practicc, Allen Tate wrote to Berryman that Homa ge to Mistress Bradstreet «adds a fourth to the three first-rate long poems by Americans in this century -the others being by Pound, Eliot, and Crane». (Cited in Kelly 298) Despite such high praise, however, Berryman was unhappy with the critica! r esponse to the poem's publication in book form. In a letter to his mother he said that «[a] deafening silence seems to be greeting AB» (Kclly 298). At first, it is difficult to understand precisely what Berryman meant by this, since the poem was praised by a number of prominent literary critics - in addition to Tate, Conrad Aiken and Edmund Wi l so n rated the poem very highlyand it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1956. One of the things that seems to have bothered Berryman, however, was th e fact that no major literary review dealt in any meaningful way wi th th e poem as a book , much less as a social or political intervention. The fact that th e controversia! left-wing _painter Ben Shahn provided a series of illustrations for it went almost en tir ely unnoticed, one exception bcing Stanley Kunit z's remark at the end of his Poetry re view: «The book is handsomely designed and printed, with drawings by Ben Shahn» (Kunitz 116). Obsessed by the idea that the poem represented merely a celebration of the Puritan origins of the American self on the one hand, and a thinly disguised confession of a love affair on the other, contemporary critics pa ved the way for subsequent evasions of the text's imp011ant dialogue with history, and its critique of contemporary American society. Shahn's involvement should have signalled an avenue towards that critique. Although Berryman had completed the poem sorne three years before Shahn agreed to provide a series of illustrations for it, the collaborative aspect of th e book is clearly stated on the cover which reads, <~ poem, with pictures by Ben Shahn». Berryman wrote to Shahn that he felt the drawings «create a good counterpoint for [the] poem», and Shahn replied that he believed the «juxtaposition» of picture and text was «groundbreaking»: the illustrations would «set a stark, lean New England mood in which the images and sensibilities of [the] poem can take place very much as New Englanders live within their very often fierce landscape without either bowing to the other». The correspondence between poet and painter suggests that, while the poem may have been published in a periodical three years before, the 1956 Farrar, Straus and Cudahy edition represented more than 64 Philip Coleman a convenient marketing ploy conceived by Berryman's publisher for the Christmas market. To the degree that Berryman believed Shahn's work was essentially in hannony with his own, it is important also to consid er Shahn's status at this time. When his first major relrospective was held at the Museum of Modero Art in NewYork in 1947, Shahn's work had been recognised for its critica! exposition of «the shortcomings of democracy in the United States», and as recently as 1954 he had been profiled in Lije magazine as the «Painter of Protest».6 Berryman, then, was implicitly making a particular set of claims for his own work as social commentary when he agreed to have Shahn illustrate what was the most imp ortant publication of his career in 195 6. Nonetheless, Shahn 's political positioning did not de t er criti cs from reading Homage to Mistress Bradstreet as a poem that uncritically valorises the American experience and the national se lf . Comparing Homage to Mistress Bradstreet to Hart Crane's The Bridge, for instance, Kunitz suggested that Berryman was attempting «to relate himself to the pase through the discovery of a viable myth, and to create for hi s ve hi cle a grand and exalted language, a language of transfiguration» (Kunitz 110). Kunitz failed to realize, however, that Berryman was lcss co ncemed with discovering «a viable myth» than he was with dismantling a nd interrogating a myth that was already long in existence, namely the mylh of American exceptionalism. The closeness of the Berryman-Shahn associalion is ev ident on the first page of the 1956 edition. The drawing that also featur es on the book 's cover, of a wooden house at the edge of a forest, is placed opposite the title of the poem and the first stanza. Picture and text occupy approximately the same amount of space on the page, chus rein fo rcing Berryman's cl aim regarding the contrapunta! relationship between text and illustration. The bleakness evoked by Shahn's drawings reflects the fact that almost every one of th e fifty-seven stanzas of the poem records the hardship a nd precariousness of Anne Bradstreet's life in th e New World. Since it is precisely through the rendering of Bradstreet 's consciousncss that Berryman gradually sets the stage for a sort of parallel commentary on his own times, we are obliged to recount her experience a nd impressions (as re-envisioned in the poem) in so rne detail. Mistress Bradstreet appears in the fourth stanza, «Pockmarkt & westward staring on a haggard deck» (CP 133). The New World that awaits her, however, is not the one she has been promised: «Üutside the New Wo rld wi nt ers in grand dark / white air lashing high thro' the virgin stands I foxes down foxholes sig h», Berryman writes in the second stanza (CP 133), presaging the harrowing description of BradstreeL's first year in the Colonies in stanzas 7, 8, and 9. See Anonymous, «Ben Shahn: Painter of Protest Turns to Reflection,» Life 4 Oct. 1954: 96-1 OO. Thc importance of the ideological dimension of Shahn's work was restated in a review of a 1998 exhibition of his work at the Jewish Museum in New York. Entitled «Trying to Separate Ben Shahn's A11 from His Politics», the review described the way that during the 1950s Shahn «became, in a sense. the c:ountry's official leftist artist, or at least the official artist for millions of Ame ri cans leaning to the l ef t». For his leftist «lcanings» Shahn was brought before the House Un-American Acti vi ties Committee in 1959. See Kimmelman 33-37. «Nightmares of Eden:» Jo/111 Berrymmi's Homage to Mistr ess Br a <lslrect 65 The journ ey across the Atlantic was itse lf fraught with calamity and fear for Bradstreet. as Berryman describes in the fifth stanza: By the week we landed we were, mo st, u se d up. Strange ships across us, after a fortnight's winds unfavouring, frightened us ; bone-sad cold, sleet, scurvy; so wcrc ill many as une day we could hav e no sermon s; broils, quelled; a fatherlcss child unkennelled; vermin crowding & waiting: waiting. (CP 13 4) If crossing the Atlantic was traumatic, however, the settlers' arri val in thc New World was worse: just as their ship, thc Arbel/a, carne in sight of land. «young Henry Winthrop [ ... ] drowned» (CP 134). Their arrival in the New World marred by thc death of y oung Winthrop, they also saw th e expec ted Ja nd of plenty turn out to be a place of starvation and disease: Ho w long with nothing in the ru inous heat. clams & acorns stomaching, dislinction perishing, at which my heart rose, with brackish water, we would sing. [ . .. ] That beyond th e Atlantic wound are woes enlarge is hard, hard that starvation burnish es our fear, but 1 do gloss for You. Stranger & pil grims fare we here, declaring we seek a City ... ( CP l 34) Etymologically, the verb «to fare» not only means to go, travel, or make one 's way, but al so to «g o astray» (become lost) or even die ( «depart from life» ). The Puritan 's faring in the New World is thus presented by Berryman as an enterprise riven by doubt and the possibility of failure, the possibility that the «City» they sought was no thi ng more than a fi ct ion. In 1965 Berryman said Homa ge to Mistress Bradstreet «laid itself out in a se ri es of rebellions» on the part of his protagonist: «a ga inst the ncw environment a nd above all against her [Anne Bradstreet 's ] barrenness (which in fact !asted for years), then against her maJTiage [ ... 1 and finalJy against her continuing life of illness, loss, and age» (FP 328). But the poem also e na cts a further «Se ri es of rebellions» -against the formal strategies of Berryman's early work on th e one hand, and in opposition to the excep ti onalist understanding of American hi story and culture on the othe r. In stanzas 9 and 10 BcJTyman not only provides a clear se nse of th e seventeenth-century