John Berryman committed suicide on this date in 1972 by jumping off the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis. I visited the site once while driving through Minneapolis. Oddly enough, I live right down the street from Philadelphia's Washington Avenue.One poem in his last collection, Delusions, Etc., seems to me have prefigured his end:
He Resigns
Age, and the deaths, and the ghosts.
Her having gone away
in spirit from me. Hosts
of regrets come and find me empty.
I don’t feel this will change.
I don’t want anything
or person, familiar or strange.
I don’t think I will sing
anymore just now,
or ever. I must start
to sit with a blind brow
above an empty heart.
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