Word: poem
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...haunted Berryman from his very earliest writing. The Dream Songs are still his most laudable accomplishment. They are not, however, a celebration of any wondrous fairyland of the unconscious mind. Henry, its hero, has "suffered an irreversible loss," and experiences its intensity through his dreams. An earlier "The Ball Poem" reflects the same "epistemology of loss" in a young boy's missing ball. More than anything else, Berryman's dreams are real laments, laced with shattered hopes and withered ideals. Alan Severance too, has very little left to hang onto. His fight for some kind of self-respect is doomed...
Near the end of his testimony, Magruder said that he was "not going to lay down and die" because of his participation in Watergate. "I think I will rehabilitate myself ... and I hope to be able to live a useful life." Impressed, Ervin reminded Magruder of a poem reading: "Each night I burn the records of the day. At sunrise every soul is born again." And he told Magruder that he had "the greatest asset that any man can have-you have a wife who stands behind you in the shadows where the sun shines...
Since the aim of the blind poet in writing the most ambitious poem in English was to justify God's ways to man, no Milton lover at this point feels much like standing up and shouting, "Milton! Thou should'st be living at this hour." Neither, as it turns out, need any Milton lover be too greatly cast down. History (like Collier) has not been kind to the Fall of Man-a satisfying and perhaps necessary myth which the modern world unwisely tends to dismiss as simple misinformation...
True, with 245 students, Brooks had grown too large for Ashburn to continue to bid each student good night with a handshake. His age, too, forced changes. In recent years, he no longer keynoted the "spring cabaret," an annual variety show, with an original poem which included rhyming reference to every student and teacher. Nor could he pitch the slow curves that once mystified batters at student-faculty baseball games. Yet Ashburn preserved what to him mattered most...
...pebble to change the reflection in a still lake. Instead, he inserts images-a staircase in shadow, an empty hallway, a narrow, brightly lit street -that not only summarize the tone of the scene just finished but establish the feeling of the one to come. Like stanzas in a poem, the scenes stand apart, enriched by what surrounds them...