John Berryman: Wash Far Away

“That’s like what I meant,” Smith hastened his drawl. “He really asks the questions about King. They’re his questions, but he kept himself out of the poem as much as he could.” 

His questions. Did he? The professor as he opened the book felt that all things were possible, and seeing the flower passage he imagined a rustling, as if his metaphor were true, and under the passage moved the animal, the massive insight of the grieving poet. “Yet the flowers are to satisfy himself, not King. Of course, the whole elegy is in King’s honour, but I mean their pathos is less than their beauty. The melancholy is all Milton’s. Listen. 

Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffadillies fill their cups with tears, To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. For so, to interpose a little ease, Let our frail thought …” 

At this point, an extraordinary thing happened. The professor saw the word “false” coming. FALSE. He felt as if snatched up by the throat and wrung. “False” threw its iron backward through the poem. The room shook. Then the unutterable verse mastered his voice and took it off like a tempest: 

“dally with false surmise. Ay me!” 

The cry rang hopeless through his mind— 

“whilst THEE the shores and sounding seas Wash far away, where‘er thy bones are hurled; Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, Where THOU perhaps under the whelming tide Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world—”