I think one can only capture The Dream Songs' lurches in tone if one reads them while half-drunk. Berryman does extraordinary violence to the language, dismembers his sentences with a theatrical wave of the knife. And in their stumbling and their turning bewildered back on themselves, his poems are already remorseful, conveying a distinctive self-conscious pathos.

The surly cop lookt out at me in sleep
insect-like. Guess, who was the insect.
I'd asked him in my robe
& hospital gown in the elevator politely
why someone saw so many police around,
and without speaking he looked.

A meathead, and of course he was armed, to creep
across my nervous system some time ago wrecked.
I saw the point of Loeb
at last, to give oneself over to crime wholly,
baffle, torment, roar laughter, or without sound
attend while he is cooked

until with trembling hands hoist I my true
& legal ax, to get at the brains. I never liked brains -
it's the texture & the thought -
but I will like them now, spooning at you,
my guardian, slowly, until at length the rains
lose heart and the sun flames out.

Dream Song 95, by John Berryman

Richard Loeb, along with his accomplice Nathan Leopold, became famous in the 1920s after murdering a 14 year-old boy with a chisel in an attempt to do something "Nietzschean". He was himself only 18 at the time, and the product of a respectable middle-class family. He was later killed in gaol by another inmate. The two friends were the inspiration for Rope.