The One Sane Milkman, I Fear

In his lifelong wrestle with what he called his “frenemy” God, John Berryman continually turned to the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sacramental vision. Amidst his struggles with depression, alcoholism, and self-doubt, Berryman looked to Hopkins as a model for how to express, and how to embrace, difficult belief. A close reading of Berryman’s “Dream Song 377,” a poem that takes Hopkins as a subject and evokes one of his sermons, shows not only that Berryman adopted versions of Hopkins’s stanzaic and stress patterns, but also that he, along with Henry, his poetic alter ego in the Dream Songs, shared with Hopkins a hunger for a still center.