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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Berryman
John Berryman
John Berryman was born John Smith in MacAlester, Oklahoma, in 1914. He received an undergraduate degree from Columbia College in 1936...
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FURTHER READING
Dreams
Monna Innominata [I dream of you, to wake]
by Christina Rossetti
A Bedtime Story For Mr. Lamb
by Arthur Nevis
A Dream Within a Dream
by Edgar Allan Poe
Bedside
by William Olsen
Counting
by Douglas Goetsch
Cradle Song
by William Blake
Darkness
by George Gordon Byron
Dream of the Evil Servant
by Reetika Vazirani
Dream Variations
by Langston Hughes
Dreaming About My Father
by Ed Ochester
Flying
by Sarah Arvio
I Might Have Dreamed This
by Kirsten Dierking
it was a dream
by Lucille Clifton
Japanese Lullaby
by Eugene Field
Lullaby of an Infant Chief
by Sir Walter Scott
Making the Bed
by Burt Kimmelman
Nocturne
by Wayne Miller
O Little Root of a Dream
by Paul Celan
Our eunuch dreams
by Dylan Thomas
The Dream of the Just
by Dana Gelinas
The Good-Morrow
by John Donne
The Land of Nod
by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Sandman
by Margaret Thomson Janvier
The Song in the Dream
by Saskia Hamilton
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
by Eugene Field
Related Prose
A Brief Guide to Confessional Poetry
Groundbreaking Book: The Dream Songs by John Berryman (1964)
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Dream Song 1 Order Now Buy the CD  
by John Berryman
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Huffy Henry hid    the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,--a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried 
open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long 
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.



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Audio Clip
October 31, 1963
Guggenhiem Museum
From the Academy Audio Archive



From The Dream Songs by John Berryman, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1959, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969 by John Berryman. Used with permission.
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