1. Theme: (1) ______Of Life. (2) Prufrockian Alienation

Name______

JOHN BERRYMAN

(1914-1972)

"DREAM SONG 14"

1. Theme: (1) ______of life. (2) Prufrockian alienation.

2. Structure: The speaker considers six aspects of life that supposedly keep it from being boring, that is, that make life worth ______: (a) family (1-8); (b) other people (9); (c) great art (10, 13); (d) your own dreams or desires (11-13); (e) physical nature (14, 17), and (f) hedonistic or sedating means, such as "______" (14).

3. Stanza one: The speaker, addressing his audience as "______” (1), affirms that life is "______" (1). He says the middle class (symbolized by his ______) contends that life is not boring. It is full of "______" (2, 3) and "______[ings]" (2, 3). She further adds that “'Ever to confess you’re ______/ means you have no / Inner ______'" (5-7).

4. Stanza two: The speaker concludes that he must have "no / ______resources because I am ______bored" (7-8). (Note: Yet the title seems to suggest he has, since "dreams” are an “inner resource.") All art and literature, "especially great ______" (10), are of absolutely no usein relieving this meaninglessness of life. "______," likewise, "bore me" (9), and he is particularly bored with his alter ego, ______, "with his plights & ______" (11) and his love of "people and ______art" (13). The speaker says that he has become as apathetic as "______" (12), an ______to the Greek warrior from the Iliad who withdrew from the Trojan War campaign because of a slight.

5. Stanza three: Not even the beauties of nature--neither "the ______hills" (14) nor "mountains or _____ or sky" (17) nor the nepenthean effects of alcohol--"______" (14)--can make him shake off the view that life is boring, as empty as the "_____" (18) of the "______" (16) of a "______" (15).

6. Stylistic devices: These mainly reinforce the theme of the speaker's rebellion against the view that life is meaningful.

(1) There is irony in line 1 where the last part ofthe line ("We ______not say ______") contradicts what the speaker has just done.

(2) In line 5, "______" is a made-up word based on "repeatedly." The new word suggests that life's repetition is what makes life so ______.

(3) In line 8, there is grammatical rebellion, since "heavy bored" should be "______bored."

(4) In line 9, "peoples" is grammatically incorrect. The speaker probably means "people" (that is, the persons belonging to a certain place, community, or class). The plural of thealready plural "people" means all the persons of a racial, national, or religious group, as in "the peoples of the earth." By using an odd plural form of an already plural word, the speaker deliberately overstates his ______.

(5) In line 12, the speaker rebels against capitalization rules by not capitalizing the first letter of ______.

(6) The unexpected end rhymes "flash" (3) across the poem: "so / ______" (1, 8) and "______/ dog / ______" (14, 15, 18).

(7) The word boring or a variant of it is used ____ times in the poem.