Poem of the week: Drunken Bellarmine by Emily Berry
Drunken Bellarmine
after Renee So
In this spirit of affliction I beheld two things,
that shame is also revelry, and a body
is a spillage, or an addiction. I do not know
if this thing belongs to me, tipped-up set of weights
that promises, but never delivers, equilibrium.
I cannot make manifest this collection of feelings,
but look at me: I want to be loved for the wrong reasons.
I mean I want to be hated for the right reasons.
I have been lonely. Every time I say the word ‘I’
I am ashamed. When I say ‘I want’ I am triply
ashamed. I want my shame to be a kind of proof
that deduces the world, and that’s the worst
shame of all. I have been theatrical, entropic,
parting with myself for company. This heartsore
will not stop weeping and look, the sky is sick,
knitted too tightly; my face is up your sleeve
like a card trick. DON’T LOVE ME: I am guilty,
fatalistic and sticky round the mouth like a dirty baby.
I am a shitting, leaking, bloody clump of cells,
raw, murky and fluorescent, you couldn’t take it.
From Emily Berry’s 2017 collection, Stranger, Baby, Drunken Bellarmine somehow delivers what the speaker says is beyond him or her: hard-won equilibrium. Yet nothing is smoothed over, muted or reconciled. The poem, like much of the collection, logs the vertiginous and rocky inner voyage of a speaker in extremis after the loss of their mother.
Although an ekphrastic poem, it belongs to its context. The powerful opening statement is biblical in tone and vocabulary: “In this spirit of affliction I beheld two things …” But we could be forgiven for assuming the persona of the collection is still speaking, at a raised pitch, of course, but not beyond its established range.
Drunken Bellarmine is the title of a fiercely comical knitted “portrait” by Renee So. The poem doesn’t usually concern itself with directly “translating” the image. Visual associations sprout readily from initially abstract soil, seeded by the vivid quartet of nouns in lines two and three: shame, revelry, spillage, addiction. At first I “saw Maenads and Dionysian revels, the glory and comedy of inebriation, incontinence and violence. The term “spirit of affliction” could even suggest one of those hangover jokes, usually found funny only the morning after the morning after. I felt quite reluctant to look up “bellarmine” because the poem spoke so powerfully on its own.
The word alludes to the Tuscan saint and theologian of the counter-reformation, San Roberto Bellarmino. Like its relative, the Bartmann jug, the bellarmine pot incorporates the face of a Bearded Man, and is designed to hold food or drink. Possibly the term originated in Protestant mockery of the ascetic Catholic Bellarmino. Berry’s poem was commissioned by the Poetry Library and the Arts Council Collection for a Southbank Centre event in 2015, Artpoetry: Poets Respond to Paintings.
The theological aspect of the backstory adds weight to a poem that interprets the visual as analogy, a portrait of good and evil, wrong and right. The term spirit of affliction gains nuance. Theologically, it can denote an evil spirit, so the Drunken Bellarmine could represent a demon. Job’s afflictions also come to mind (“This heartsore / will not stop weeping.”) The suffering, self-despising Bellarmine is also able wittily to criticise his creator: “the sky is sick / knitted too tightly.” For a moment, he solipsistically interprets his surroundings and the “you” he addresses (“my face is up your sleeve”) as knitting.
Primarily, the poem seems to be the oration of the Bellarmine upon himself, giving us a wonderfully accurate picture of ever-shifting comic-pathetic-demonic-human complexity. The vocabulary of self-analysis is gloriously rich: “theatrical”, “entropic”, “sticky”. You can imagine a case of supernatural possession, in fact, the voice speaking through the poem’s mouth, giving a new ambiguous timbre to the real voice without obliterating it, as would be the aim in a conventional dramatic monologue.
The reference to “leaking” and “the bloody clump of cells” later on suggest menstruation. The knitted, twisted Bellarmine oddly voices a unity of characterstics: it is man-woman, child-adult, sinner-confessor, philosopher-drunk. Of course his/her reasoning may not quite make sense, as when the wanting “to be loved for the wrong reasons” is glibly reversed to wanting “to be hated for the right reasons”. The Bellarmine is intelligent and self-aware, yet dominated by the most invasive and least rational-seeming of emotions, shame. The speaker hasn’t found his voice or himself. He is physically split and that fissure is also his mental state. He (it’s hard not to think of the speaker as primarily male) is almost physically wrecked, but not able to escape self-consciousness and self-mockery.
In the drama of mourning, the body sometimes quite brutally pushes itself forward and takes control: mind and body engage, argue, coalesce. Dualism is exploded as myth. “These poems emerge from a place that had been completely mute for a long time,” Berry said in an interview with Ralf Webb. The revelatory processes of Stranger, Baby combine tidal energy with filigree verbal nuance and observation, creating a vigorous and unusual elegiac narrative, in which the pressure is as analytical as emotional.
Despite that warning shout, “DON’T LOVE ME”, the Bellarmine’s plea is to be allowed to be childish. Whatever his stickiness and guilt, he has also mounted a convoluted argument for the right to be loved – one that, after all, mothers generally manage to grant their shamelessly messy babies.
