A long way from Shakespeare: JohnBerryman's Dream Songs

John Berryman's Sonnet 14 from 77 Dream Songs doesn't age well. In youth, I loved the strange opening line (by which the sonnet is known): "Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so." But why? The hipster attitude, I guess, when we thought everything around us was dull, square, and conventional. But why this lament about every aspect of life: the sky, the sea, our (or, the poet's) own emotions, people (pretty big category there), literature especially great literature, his own writing (Henry, who bores him, is the protagonist of the Dream Songs), "valiant art" (as opposed to literature?), and gin. I guess it's vaguely amusing that all of these things bore the poet - but why do they bore him? He says nothing about their qualities or about his qualities of mind - though we are given to understand that Berryman was another one of the disturbed, probably alcoholic poets of his generation (like so many, he took his own life. What saves the poem from dreariness, to a degree, is the peculiar ending: a dog disappears with its tail, and, in the poem's truncated last line: "leeaving/Behind: me, wag." That line always gets a laugh of recognition, but what is it saying: the poet is actually a version of a dog, servile and a sycophant? Or else, the poet is abandoned by his art: the dog disappearing, leaving him with nothing to do but lament his status (bored with everything) and behave mechanistically (wag), and not able even to finish a full line of verse (last line only two measures). Berryman's talent was fragile, as he must have known, and the line between creative genius and mad ramblings probably never so blurred as in his work. He pushed against the edge of form: choosing to write sonnets that aren't really sonnets at all. Back to that first line, with its off-beat enjambments: it sounds little like a line of verse, and I was surprised to count and see that, sonnet-like, it does have 10 syllables. But impossible to read it rhythmically: we've come a long way since "Shall I compare the to a summer's day?"