Poet John Berryman's masterpiece, The Dream Songs is actually a combination of two books, 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest that together form parts I through VII of a single long work. Both books were originally published by Faber & Faber, the first in 1964, the second in 1969. The work in its entirety was first published in 1969.

The Dream Songs is composed of 385 individual poems, each sharing certain structural elements. Each Song is composed of three stanzas, each six lines long. Berryman is nothing if not crafty, and his rhyme schemes are willfully complex. Among the many variations, two typical schemes stand out:

1)
A
B
C
D
A
B

C
E
F
D
E
F

G
H
I
G
H
I


2)
A
B
B
C
A
C

D
E
F
F
E
D

F
G
H
G
F
H

Berryman's meter is more difficult to puzzle out: his mastery of the line is never more apparent than in his breaks and off-pace rhythms. He seems to have one ear cocked for the english pentameter of his mentor Yeats, but the other is always listening for a place to drop a long pause, a sharp break, or a mournful run.

His subject matter is painstakingly intimate, often despairing but at times full of humor and joy. Compare his elegies to Delmore Schwartz with the well-known Song #4 for a sample of his remarkable range. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was never content with the merely personal, choosing instead to celebrate and memorialize his heroes and colleagues, and to address a multitude of real-world issues.

The poet has this to say in his forward to the 1969 collected edition:

The poem, then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof. Requiescat in pace.