Berryman in the backyard. 

Sunday night, during the season 3 finale of HBO's “Succession,” I asked Patricia if she knew where the title of the episode, “All the Bells Say,” came from. She did not, and I forgot to look it up, but this morning, reading a synopsis in The New York Times, she told me it was from one of John Berryman's Dream Songs. She told me this not only because I'd asked but because she knew I knew the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. He and my father were friends from the time Dad interviewed him for a feature profile in the Minneapolis Tribune in 1965 until Berryman's death by suicide in January 1972 at age 57. He came over to our house in South Minneapolis. He had a nice daughter named Martha. He had a long beard. We called him Santa Claus.

He actually wrote one of the Dream Songs for my father, number 325, the one that begins “Control it now, it can't do any good,” about the sudden death of Dad's friend Pat McCarty, which includes the line, “Our dead frisk us, & later they get better at it.” It ends this way:

Henry made lists of his surviving friends
& of the vanished on their uncanny errands
and took a deep breath.

The older I get, the more these lines mean to me.

So not only did I know the poet of the lines referenced in the episode title, I knew the poem, Dream Song 29, intimately. In college, or afterwords, I'd even titled a short story “There Came a Thing So Heavy,” truncating a few of the first lines. The relevant line for the episode is “All the bells say: too late.” I have to admit, I don't remember that one at all, but it's another great line, a Never send to ask for whom the bell tolls kind of line.

It fits the episode perfectly. The Roy children, Kendall, Roman and Shiv, finally stop fighting for once and band together to stop their divide-and-conquer father, this universe's Rupert Murdoch, from selling a controlling interest in the company to a tech dick played by Alexander Skarsgard. But on the way to the battle—and please, accept this SPOILER ALERT for anyone who wants to see the episode fresh—as they're rallying the troops, the daughter, Shiv, calls her husband, Tom, to let him know what's about to go down. Even as it was happening, I was like, “Oh, bad move.” And it was. Tom betrays them, the patriarch pivots, and the kids arrive, as both he and the bells say, too late. And there goes their legacy. 

I always liked Dream Song 29 because of the way it begins:

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
So heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleeping, in all them time
Henry could not make good. 

We're whole and then we're not. I think everyone feels this at some point in their lives. How did I get here? Wasn't it so much better over there? Before I knew? It's why the Eden myth resonates so much.

The final stanza of the poem speaks to the episode, too. In season 1, Kendall, played by Jeremy Strong—about whom The New Yorker recently published a fantastic profile—causes the death of a waiter at his sister's wedding in England. It's Chappaquiddick-like: a car goes into the drink, only one gets out. But it's levened a bit because Kendall was in pursuit of drugs rather than sex, and we see him trying to save the dude. But then he flees the scene. And it's been eating at him ever since. Last night, he finally tells his siblings of his crime. He sits on a dusty alley in Italy and cries and tells them how he killed a guy; and they're suddenly put in the awkward position of bucking him up. And that's what binds them together enough to try to take on their father. 

This is the final stanza of Dream Song 29:

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

The episode was written by Jamie Carragher and series creator Jesse Armstrong. There's a lot of smart people working on “Succession.”