On David Berman’s Poem “Coincidence”

Coincidence

David Berman

For Mildred Nash

 

Coincidence.  Perhaps coincidence

Explains it all.  Why look far out, in deep

For mystical solutions to make sense

Of how a dream disturbed more than my sleep—

A dream in which you sat bolt upright on

A Windsor chair and wore a long blue dress

(Ornamented with a white chiffon)

And on your visage bore a dark distress

And said your dog was dead?  When I awoke,

I thought the dream an impetus to phone,

And when I did, the first words that you spoke,

Through sobs, were that your cat had died.  Your tone

Was as it had been in my dream, which plain

Coincidence tries too hard to explain?

So “plain coincidence” tries to work too hard to explain the similarities between the content of the dream and the subsequent conversation. 

It’s paradoxical. 

Coincidence is typically the simplest explanation for such similarities. It dispels less straightforward explanations that defy the occurrence of simple unlikely off chance events. 

So poems’ end inverts the introductory surmise as to the explanatory power of coincidence.

The surmise:

Coincidence.  Perhaps coincidence

Explains it all. 

but then at the end:

Your tone

Was as it had been in my dream, which plain

Coincidence tries too hard to explain?

So aren’t we finally left then with an explanation that in an ironic sense doesn’t have to try as hard as coincidence?

Ironic because while penetrating “the deep For mystical solutions” is beyond doing, it works less hard than the ready to hand, immediate explanatory power of coincidence that requires no further probing.

But there’s one caveat to this inversion, namely the concluding question mark.

So as the poem has it, it’s a question whether “Coincidence tries too hard to explain?”.