The Confusing Writing Style of John Berryman’s Dream Songs :: Dream Songs

The Confusing Writing Style of John Berryman’s Dream Songs John Berryman presents an interesting and somewhat confusing grouping of stories in his first twenty-six Dream Songs. The six line stanzas seem to reveal the dreams that Berryman has. The poems are written with poor grammar and have a very random rhyme scheme. They perplexed me greatly reading through them, as they seemingly have no order or plot. Beginning with the rhyme scheme of The Dream Songs, Berryman seems to follow no specific order. In the 8th song, Berryman uses the pattern abcabc, but in the 11th song he uses abccda throughout the three six-line stanzas. In many of the other sections he does not follow one pattern through all three stanzas. Also in some of them it seems as though he uses slant rhyme, using words that do not exactly rhyme but have strongly related sounds. One example of this slant rhyme occurs in the 5th song; â€Å"while the brainfever bird did scales; / Mr Heartbreak, the New Man, /come to farm a crazy land;/ an image of the dead on the fingernail† (7). With this example scales and fingernail and man and land present words that do not completely rhyme. Berryman’s random use of rhyme scheme correlates to the randomness of the entire work of the first section of his dream songs. The language that Berryman writes with in The Dream Songs also serves to complicate the work. He goes back and forth in using African American slang language and inverted English. He writes; â€Å"The enemy are sick, / and so is us of, Often rising trysts, / like this one, drove he out† (12). This phrase makes no sense grammatically and presents quite a challenge for the reader to paraphrase. Berryman also throws in an occasional phrase in another language, as he does in the 12th song; â€Å"Tes yeux bizarres me suivent† (14). This example just provides one more way in which Berryman makes his writing difficult to get through and even more difficult to understand.