A Thesis Entitled:
"Without face, or shape, or history"::
Time in the Poetry of Robert Penn Warren
submitted for Honors
to the English Department at Davidson,
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Bachelor of Arts, with Honors.
by
Katherine Louise Burd
May 2014
Thesis Committee:
______________________________
______________________________
Director: Zoran Kuzmanovich, Ph.D.
submitted for review
Professor and Chair of English
______________________________
______________________________
Reader: Randy F. Nelson, Ph.D.
Reader: Maria F. Fackler, Ph.D.
Virginia Lasater Irvin Professor of English
Associate Professor of English
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To Mom, who taught me how to read books,
and to Dad, who won’t stop buying them.
Finis Origine Pendet
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All I can do is offer my testimony.
Robert Penn Warren
“Rattlesnake Country”
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I.
THE UNWORDABLE UTTERANCE ................................................................................................. 1
II.
FLIGHT PATTERNS .................................................................................................................................... 8
III.
“THAT JOY IN WHICH ALL JOYS SHOULD REJOICE” ............................................................. 23
IV.
“GREAT DISTANCES, AND STARLIGHT” ...................................................................................... 33
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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
Works by [Insert Author]
CP
HLK
The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. John Burt.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.
In the Heart’s Last Kingdom. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1984.
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I. The “Unwordable Utterance”
Over eighty of Robert Penn Warren’s poems replace “time” with “Time,” a sharp
capitalization that many critics choose to ignore. To capitalize a word in the middle of a
sentence, a phrase, a stanza, or a beat of a poem imbues that word with mystery. Each time
Warren returns to Time over his five-decade poetic career, he draws readers into a
particular and unceasing preoccupation. Set apart with a capital letter, Time (contrasted
with time) invites readers to consider the different planes of philosophy, consciousness, and
art that reside within the idea of Time.
Ironically, though Warren developed and complicated Time throughout his career, he
remained trapped by the chronological passage of time: each change of perspective only
admits to another month, another year, another decade elapsed. Because it implies creation
over time, the act of writing imposes limits on the poet’s ability to seek a definition of Time
beyond the clock. Words, numbers, and images precisely mark the passage of time and
allow humanity to measure itself in apparently universal increments. Even for a hiker
without a watch, the position of the sun separates the day into east-time and west-time. In a
symphony, the language of half-notes and measures visually organizes sound in both space
and time. On a birth certificate, the numbers and letters of date and time confirm the
existence of life.
Yet despite these limitations, in his writings on Time Warren guides his reader beyond the
established temporal structure by which he understands the progression of life to enter into
a new, more profound sensibility. Richard Jackson calls Warren’s Time “a structure that
provides a more complete experience than in sensations that follow ‘breath by breath’ in
some sequence of unrelated, pure presences” (Jackson 4). “History,” Jackson feels, is
manipulated by “relation” to form a “complete experience” beyond chronological, textbook1
style history, a leap that mirrors Warren’s contrast between Time and time. In Warren’s
poetry, Jackson observes that “complete experience” can inspire new joy and freedom as his
speaker experiences the breaths of life anew, differentiated from the more quotidian joy of
life lived moment by moment. “It is language,” he boldly writes, “which overcomes the
abyss” of a being doomed to die (Jackson 16). These assertions establish a productive basis
for criticism of Warren’s poetry, though Jackson’s analyses of Warren’s poems often
subordinate or even ignore the lingering anxieties of existence underlying Warren’s best
poems. Though Jackson joins Warren in his desire for the jubilation of Time, he chooses to
ignore the essential fact that Time, to the mortal Warren, must be a temporary experience.
Warren seeks to defy the limitations of his own temporality and find himself in the Time
that Jackson also admires; the power of Time, in Warren’s poetry, emerges in its lingering
even after temporal logic crowds it out.
Jackson’s idealism runs counter to others of Warren’s reviewers, who reject the
capitalization of Time on the grounds that its abstract connotations distract from the simple
beauty of his poetry. William Pritchard jokes that “Warren owns something like a Time and
History Tank,” and complains that drawing from it merely masks his failure (due to old age)
to search “for the mot juste” (Pritchard 108). For Pritchard, the value of Warren’s work lies
in “the universality of the situations” he describes, rather than his desire to wrestle “with
the big impossible questions which have none, or only one answer” (Pritchard 109). The
“emotions” of Warren’s poetry appear “poignant,” but “his is not a poetry of ideas,”
Pritchard asserts; where Jackson believes Time offers freedom, Pritchard sees it as an
unnecessary fetter on Warren’s poetic potential. Likewise, Tom Absher calls Time an
“abstraction” that, in different contexts, does “not become progressively or cumulatively
engaging” but reappears in his poems for no evident reason (Absher 239). He wishes that
Warren’s poems would not “rear their ugly T’s” (Absher 240). Yet Time’s ugliness comes not
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from lack of meaning but from the density of its meaning. Warren’s is a poetry of ideas:
unfortunately, these ideas are not as straightforward as Richard Jackson might hope, but
their importance only grows upon careful consideration.
The term “Time” contains both rich, abstract possibility and disappointing, logical
limitation. Every new word one can use to describe Time (“history,” “complete experience”)
must be adjusted by another qualifier. A word cannot be a “complete experience,” but a
collection of words may help one live “in a structure that provides a more complete
experience,” which means that the reading of the words surrounding Time shapes the
reader’s interpretation of the term (italics mine) (Jackson 4).
A weighty literary and philosophical history encumbers the term Time with or without
capitalization, rendering confident assertions of alternative meaning nearly impossible. In
this sense, poetry, which can create intense meaning without distinct arguments, is perhaps
the best medium in which to explore the idea. Warren often cleverly introduces and then
subverts the image of the clock–the most enduring symbol of the passage of seconds,
minutes, and hours–in his discussion of Time. The invention of the mechanical clock in the
Medieval Age, which rigidly restructured human endeavor around “productivity and
performance” (West-Pavlov 17), eventually motivated physicists to develop contemporary
clocks that, because of refined and complex physics equations, must be corrected by only
thirty-eight millionths of a second each day (West-Pavlov 26). This hidden imprecision,
which requires even the most precise clock to be recalibrated, deflates the illusion of
control that clocks can offer.
The fact that these means of measuring and marking time remain imperfect becomes
important in light of Warren’s poetry: though the presence of the ticking clock limits
Warren’s ability to escape fully into Time, the imperfection of that clock hints at an abstract
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and incommunicable Time. Poetry mirrors this paradox. As a poem progresses down a page,
its repetitions and sounds refer back to earlier parts to foster a more holistic understanding.
By capitalizing the word Time, Warren suggests that time, in his poetry, functions
differently and means more than his reader initially expects. Form can dictate the passage
of time in a poem as the poet manipulates punctuation, word arrangement, and sentence
length to indicate where a reader should halt, what a reader should emphasize, and when a
reader should read through fluidly. Rhythm, expressed by a series of markings and sound
patterns on a page, dictates the pace of a poem. In the Medieval Age, Chaucer’s and
Petrarch’s metered poetry coincided with the introduction of clocks to everyday life. By the
time Shakespeare penned sonnets, clocks were widespread even in rural churches and clock
towers (West-Pavlov 16), their proliferation due in part to the age of discovery, during
which clocks were crucial to a better understanding of longitude and latitude (West-Pavlov
15). A poem written with metronomical meter imprints time and space with an illusion of
control, but the reality of disorganized demotic speech contrasts with this cadence. Like the
ticking of a clock or the squares on a calendar, the poet’s dominion over the space or time of
his poem, suggested by meter, reflects the illusion that man occupies logical temporal
patterns. Pritchard and Absher’s desire to ignore Time affirms the temptation to understand
time as hegemonic, immutable function and to reflect it as such in the organization of
human life and art.
This temptation to order persists even in the most formally rebellious poems, for all poems
are inscribed in time; the marked page is a temporal object, and the act of marking it a
temporal act. Reading “Time” off the page, as in a recitation, reveals exactly how easily the
capitalized word’s impact can recede. In “Tell Me a Story,” Warren writes that “The name of
the story will be time, / But you must not pronounce its name,” for to speak “Time” is to
reduce it, again, into time: there is no oral means of differentiating between the two (CP
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266). The barriers in communicating Time appear even in the act of reading aloud; still,
Warren willingly accepts these limitations on his project. Employing imperfect words to
tackle an issue “irremediable” in its incomprehensibility can still open both reader and
speaker to “unexpected joy” in the form of a poem (HLK 123).
Understanding the expansiveness of Time afforded Warren freedom to use the word within
a variety of formal structures and across a broad collection of themes. Early in his career,
influenced by his Agrarian teacher John Crowe Ransom, Warren wrote highly structured
poems using predictable rhymes and antiquated language. Even in these relatively
unremarkable early projects, Warren occasionally capitalized Time. By the 1950s and
1960s, he used it to describe the functions of rivers (“Tale of Time,” CP 192), in biographical
poems (as his speaker leaps from memory to memory), and, confusingly, as the opposite of
“no-Time” (“Ballad of Billie Potts,” CP 89). In different poems even before the 1968
publication of Audubon, A Vision, Time is: “only a shade on the underside of the beech-leaf”
(“Dream,” CP 353); “a blunt experiment” (“Monologue at Midnight,” CP 65); “unwinking eye”
(“The Ballad of Billie Potts,” CP 84); “motion” (“The Ballad of Billie Potts, CP 86); “silence”
(“End of Season,” CP 70); “innocence” (“End of Season,” CP 70); “West” (“The Ballad of Billie
Potts,” CP 81); “a falling spool” (“Arrogant Law,” CP 152); and “a dark stream” (“Tale of
Time,” CP 192). Time grew to function as adjective, as dictator, as beast; its definition
expanded as Warren’s career continued.
The presence of Time in these different scenarios affirms its constant relevance in Warren’s
thought. In “Grandfather Clock,” “Time thrusts through the time of no-Time,” a statement
that helpfully tells the reader that time is not the opposite of Time (“Grandfather Clock,” CP
310). Playing with a term that cannot be defined thus invites varying readings of Warren’s
meaning when he writes about Time. Abandoning authoritative definitions of Time, Warren
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favors descriptions of experience; rather than “viewing a distant river,” he uses poetry to
place himself “in the river” (HLK 11).
Though Warren appears to open endless doors into Time without ever offering a working
definition of the concept, repeating patterns of diction, theme, and form across his poems
offer pulses through which one may enter into understandings of the concept. In the rise
and fall of birds, the distance of starlight, the contrasts of shadow and light that describe the
experience of Time, one can face the challenge of Time that Warren so frequently sets forth
in his poetry.
Critics’ readings of the function of Time in Warren’s poetry occasionally overlap.
Some question the capitalization itself: Absher treats Time as an abstraction and a
distraction from the aesthetic value of the poem, and Pritchard denies its ability to reveal
philosophical elements in Warren’s work. Opposing them, A.L. Clements praises Warren’s
ability to trudge through memory to achieve a mystical rebirth at poem’s end; Calvin
Bedient carries this line of thought so far as to suppose “jubilation” in the face of a Time in
which anxious and happy memories intermingle within the speaker. Bedient looks closely at
Warren’s poems to find words like “joy” or “thrill” towards which, he claims, Warren directs
his momentum. But Jackson’s criticism offers the most nuanced and careful glance toward
the poem as a whole. In the process of stringing together “pure presences” outside of the
chronology in which they first occur, Jackson recognizes the presence of less desirable
experiences. Clinging to the idea that experiencing Time allows Warren and his speaker to
overcome the “abyss” of death, however, detracts from the power of Jackson’s argument;
where Jackson views birds that transcend earth, he avoids birds that encounter “the boom,
the lead pellet” (CP 376).
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Warren, however, wrote of only one kind of “abyss”—an “abyss” within the self, which
offers possibilities for exploring greater truth (Democracy and Poetry 71). The pain of
temporal existence, which fetters Time, cannot be overcome but adds to the speaker’s
yearning to find Time in the “abyss” of the self. Victor Strandberg comes closest to
describing this dynamic when he likens Warren’s writing to an “osmosis” that “absorbs the
self into the totality of time and nature” (Strandberg 24). Time allows for an interaction of
self with world, in which that which has been known may be freely experienced, arranged,
interpreted, and enjoyed, even if the poem must reach its fated, temporal end.
The Time poem, one finds, bears a recognizable imprint. Despite the differences between his
poems, Warren strings together themes across his body of work that reveal his fixations and
drive his practiced approach to the Time he treasures, desires, and seeks constantly to
know fully. Each poem under consideration here begins on the cusp of physical, natural
change: horizons, seasons, or years. This “fragmentation of the world,” Strandberg writes,
“cries out for some sense of oneness” (Strandberg 24). By combining disparate moments
with subtle metric variations, Warren breaks down chronological functions so that the
tension of the horizon persists while its fragmentation blurs; here, his speaker enters Time.
In Time, all moments are accessible and none are lost. Warren treats this space as almost
sacred, almost transcendent, though it remains rooted in memories both good and bad.
They meet, organically and unfettered, and offer hope for a kind of wholeness in which all
moments can stand together and interact. In this place of “Pure Being,” readers know the
intimate embrace of self, by which they make sense of the events that take place in their
temporal lives. Yet this enactment of Time, like the poem, cannot last. Warren’s entry into
and desire to understand Time through poetry ends in the return to temporality; the
moment of change with which the poem began flips and the poet, its author, and its reader
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are reinscribed into the shifting natural world. Time is bound by time even as it yearns for
freedom.
II. Flight Patterns
Warren’s invitation to connect uses of Time across poems conflicts with the implicit
invitation of a poem to be read as self-encompassing whole. Yet probing the semiotic
functions of the term “Time” requires pointing to other poems penned by Warren that
include it. The similarities and differences between the uses of Time in his poems allow the
term to fold back in on itself and intensify a reader’s desire to know what Time signifies,
even as the possible answers, from poem to poem, seem to conflict.
With a writing career spanning decades, Warren’s staggering volume of CP repeats many
motifs: birds, sex, starlight, fire, snow, and clocks, to name a few. In the more than eighty
poems that use the word Time, these images, themes, and forms develop the contexts in
which the word acts. This paper focuses specifically on poems published between 1968 and
1980, a period in which Warren’s sense of Time emerges particularly profoundly. This
chapter approaches four poems that together illuminate, at least in part, the concept of
Time: “Evening Hawk,” “Grackles, Goodbye,” “Heart of Autumn,” and “Tell Me a Story.”
Like many of Warren’s poems, each of these works discusses birds. The bird appears in the
first stanza of the poem, perceived by the speaker. Geese figure in “Heart of Autumn” and
“Tell Me a Story,” grackles in “Grackles, Goodbye,” and a hawk in “Evening Hawk.” Though
each bird is viewed from below, each is characterized by its action, its appearance to the
speaker on earth, and the impact of its call.
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In “Grackles, Goodbye,” the flock of grackles “glint” in the light, “wheel” in the “sun-glare,”
and “splay away” in a wild motion that contrasts with a stationary viewer (CP 391). As the
speaker observes this motion he becomes aware of his own lack of movement, stating in
simple declarative sentences: “I watch them go. I stand in my trance” (CP 391). Awareness
of his own motionlessness ironically inspires awareness of the motion of everything around
him. The next line, “Another year gone,” implies a separation between the first and second
stanzas; the next part of the line, however, returns the speaker to a “trance of realization,”
thereby superimposing the trance of bird watching onto the memory of leaf watching (CP
391). When “Another year gone” reappears at the start of the next stanza, the speaker again
“stands” to “see the hole filled,” thus unifying three temporally separate moments (CP 391).
The bird with which the poem begins introduces the speaker to Time, full of separate yet
unified memories. Each memory gains renewed significance beyond its temporal placement
in Time; unfortunately, the fact that no part of a life fully dies results in pain. In this sudden
collapse of three moments, the speaker snarls at the way “the undertaker’s sick lie” (the
“obscene fake lawn” spread over the hole of his mother’s grave) that moments and mothers
are lost forever can be “Flung thus in the teeth of Time” (CP 391).
Bookending the poem with the presence of fleeing birds and the absence of returning birds
reminds the reader, and the speaker, of migration cycles. During the foray into memory, the
birds flee completely, and the sky grows “vacant and lonely,” as it will be until the “rusty
creak high above” returns (CP 391). Like birds, memories reappear in new circumstances
with each migration cycle; social structure persists while new generations replace the old.
Themes develop, both always new and never new: the birds always flitter in a characteristic
way, and the leaves always fall. The function of Time will be different once time has passed,
but it will also be the same.
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In “Grackles, Goodbye,” birds mimic human interiority, but in other poems, the bird and the
speaker of the poem intermingle. In “Evening Hawk,” the bird’s actions seem to affect the
very life of the speaker. The first stanza introduces an imposing figure: unlike the almost
giggling grackles, “the hawk comes” “from plane of light to plane,” easily breaking through
different layers of space (CP 326). The hawk presides over a “black angularity of shadow”
(CP 326); flying “above” all, it looms like a mountain or a cloud, surpassing in power what
once seemed vast and important. Again, though the speaker watches in stillness, he defines
the hawk by the way it moves: the speaker’s grandiose description reflects his admiration.
As “his wing / Scythes down another day” like a “honed steel-edge,” “the crashless fall of
stalks of Time,” “heavy with the gold of our error” cuts into a personal reality (CP 326). After
the isolated line of the heaviness of “our” error, the “us” of the world comes into focus under
the “unforgiving” eye of the hawk (CP 326).
Though the hawk is the focus of the poem, it does not dominate the poem’s progress. What
the reader of the poem sees stems from the speaker’s observations of the bird, rather than
from any direct revelation from the bird who, despite his symbolic majesty, lacks
comprehensible voice. For the hawk does not embody Time, nor does it understand Time:
instead, it “knows neither Time nor error,” thus separated from any understanding either of
what it destroys or of the reason for its (“our error,” whose weight signals its readiness for
harvest) destruction (CP 325). Calvin Bedient believes the hawk’s “scythe” allows it to
dominate Time (he incorrectly leaves Time uncapitalized, writing about “time nor error”),
but this allows the hawk more knowledge and ability than he in fact possesses (HLK 167).
Though the hawk’s eye is “unforgiving,” it cannot know “error,” and therefore has nothing to
forgive. The hawk does not perceive the world with a judging eye, but the speaker,
perceiving the hawk from earth, interprets its power as judgment (CP 326). And it is not just
the speaker of the poem who is judged, but also the collective “us.”
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As darkness closes in, the poem shifts into a new age of history, represented by “the last
bat” (CP 326). “The last thrush” falls silent, and the mammal, who “cruises in his sharp
hieroglyphics,” replaces the kingdom of birds to convey invisible and impenetrable
messages to those below who, unlike him, cannot see in darkness (CP 326). Whereas, in
daylight, the hawk offered new wisdom, now, in darkness, the poem’s speaker only sees and
recognizes “hieroglyphs” and “wisdom” which is “ancient, too, and immense” (CP 326). In
the darkness, the speaker’s voice recedes into vague recognition of a deep, powerful, and
undecipherable meaning codified in his surroundings and shrouded in darkness. In this
darkness, “The star / Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain,”—a note to remind him that
amid the darkness lies hope that elucidating light may emerge again (CP 326). In this
circumstance Plato’s philosophy is steady because it provides evidence that man may
approach the “ancient” wisdom that appears irremediably beyond him.
Though the action of the flying creatures allows the speaker of the poem to combine the
forward progress of the day (the sunset), history (ancient hieroglyphics), and man’s
shortcomings (collective error), the ability to understand Time fully halts under the
“steady” star (CP 326). This juxtaposition of motion and stillness places a limit on the
liberation the hawk seems to provide. The star is part of a decipherable “geometry” but is
also lyrically distant (CP 326). It is not eternal, but it is eternally unknowable. These
complicating details break down the speaker’s understanding of Time and its function in his
world.
Thus, though the speaker appears to have flown out of the frame of both time-awareness
and Time-awareness in observing the hawk’s powerful, otherworldly momentum, this
upper limitation forces the speaker/bird to look back on the earth from which it came. In
this stillness, “if there were no wind,” the speaker, before distracted by the bird’s activity,
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might notice that despite his physical stillness he nonetheless participates in a temporal
humanity:
we might, we think, hear
The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar. (CP 326)
The image of this leaking pipe appropriately demonstrates the disappointment of the
speaker of the poem as he remembers his temporally bound life. History acts both as
reminder of the passage of time and as hiding place for its waste. To encapsulate these less
attractive elements of history in the darkness of the cellar is to hide them willfully, but the
waste still drips out and sends its stink into the home. In like manner, the earth “[grinds] on
its axis” and on the nerves of the observer, who, even under the trance of the most majestic
bird, cannot escape from ugly temporality (CP 326).
None of Warren’s bird poems allow the wonder of the birds, which aid in escaping
temporality or understanding Time, to conquer fully the concerns of their earthly observers.
The speaker of “Heart of Autumn” transforms (metaphorically) into a goose at the end of the
poem, but still can find neither the words to utter the “unwordable utterance,” to which he
is tempted by “a fierce impulse,” nor the courage to follow that impulse (CP 376). In this
“transformation” into a goose, he discovers the insufficiency of even that figure whose
“imperial utterance” sounded, on earth, so powerful, to transcend the mortality that traps
him (CP 376). Though the trajectory of height and horizon seems to move him into Time,
even the signal call of that journey seems vague, like the process of describing Time.
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The portrait of the goose, in “Heart of Autumn,” appears equally mystical but less powerful
than that of the hawk of “Evening Hawk.” Like the grackles of “Grackles, Goodbye,” the geese
appear in a group at the beginning of the poem, “in perfect formation” (CP 376). Their
innate migratory cycle and mortality again fascinate: the timeless “nature” by which they
“know / The path of pathlessness” is still a path, which points to “a land of warm water”
despite “the boom, the lead pellet” of death (CP 376). Though the bird is a “Sky-strider, /
Star-strider,” it does not comprehend or encompass the sky but “cries out for distance” (CP
376). The “high beat” of the geese’s migratory direction escapes the pointless “Path of logic”
and “path of folly” that come with human analysis, offering instead an alternative to the
incomprehensible “joy / Of destiny fulfilling its own name” (CP 376). The speaker’s escape
comes, this time, from understanding the bird’s temporality, and instead offers joy in the
midst of limitation. In the final analysis, this is the project of Warren’s Time poems: to know
temporality, to rail against its limitations, to notice a different and unutterable state of
affairs (Time), and to remember its importance even when the logic of temporality crowds
in again.
Throughout Robert Penn Warren’s poems, then, birds help develop perspectives on
temporality and the Time that lies beyond it. “Tell Me a Story” leans into this mystery by
telling a story about the connection between a pack of geese and a young boy. The poem
begins with “Long ago” to reach backwards in an act of rebellion against temporality while
recognizing its implicit trap (CP 266). Though the boy in the memory stands still, he stands
“by a dirt road, in first dark” listening to the “great geese” that “hoot northward” (CP 266);
these images connote motion juxtaposed with his motionlessness. He knows the geese not
by sight but by sound, because even the orienting light is dim, “there being no moon / And
the stars sparse” (CP 266). The speaker of the poem situates himself in the naïveté of his
boyhood; the importance of the birds is not their tumbling, their yearning for boundary, or
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their acceptance of boundary. The youth is even unaware of what was “happening” inside of
him (CP 266). Instead, the “northward” passage of the geese echoes, guarded by the
darkness of the youth’s innocence (CP 266).
The poem is a story, which renders metafictional the imperative to “tell me a story.” If
storytelling conveys meaning, then the story of part [A] is deeply ironic, demanding
meaning from simple, declarative sentences. Part [B], presumably composed by the
retrospective poetic persona in the present, suggests that a story may escape and
compensate for “this century, and moment, of mania,” though the child’s story is perhaps
the most maniac of all (CP 266). But the hope and the exploratory nature of the story that
become exciting: the speaker of “Tell Me a Story” explores the simple beginnings of Time. A
story named Time, whose name must not be pronounced for fear of confusion, is absurd.
The story of the geese is a simple one, but the story the geese write in the heart of the
speaker is the complex story of Time, “a story of deep delight” (CP 266). Thus the birds
emerge as an entryway into the heart’s delightfully ambiguous “happening,” its “fierce
impulse / to unwordable utterance,” though the “pipe in the cellar” persists in its odorous
leaking (CP 266).
Features in the natural landscape, however, bring the birds into view. Identifying details of
season, sky color, and light quality situate the bird in mood and attitude in each poem; the
speaker’s tone shifts depending on the words and worlds that both create and are created
by the avian portraits. Seasonal signs accompany each memory and serve as markers of
moment, indicators of its inevitable passing, and bookmarks for reimagining memory. In
“Grackles, Goodbye,” the turning leaves, “flame-red” and “yellow” reappear to reorder and
prioritize related details from unrelated memories and formulate a new understanding of a
life (CP 391). Henri Bergson explains this poetic construction as “a process of organization
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or interpretation of conscious states,” the result of the value added by the individual and
ascribed to a particular moment (Bergson 63). Thus, in “Grackles, Goodbye” Warren does
not simply “decipher” or “decode” the past but rather questions his reader’s understanding
of past, present, and future by manipulating memory (Jackson 6). This technique is a
hallmark of Warren’s approach to Time and can be expanded by revisiting an image (say,
that of a flying bird) in different poems. The geese in “Heart of Autumn” fly south “for a land
of warm water” (CP 376), but the geese in “Tell Me a Story” “hoot northward,” in “the season
before the elderberry blooms” (CP 266). Despite their different directions, the birds’ flight
patterns string together images and sounds for the reader that follows them across
Warren’s works, enacting Time in the act of reading as birds enact it in their flight.
Though Warren’s poems rarely situate these scenes in a particular year or month, the
descriptions usually include a quality of light connected to time of day. These time-markers
repeatedly situate the speaker at the turn of a season, a day, or an age. Warren constantly
positions his speaker and his reader in the instability of impending change, where their
yearning to fight the forward function of human temporality matches his own. The timestamp of the poem calls to mind memories that mingle within Time and evokes the
speaker’s anxiety that those memories are already past as the present soon will be.
The grackles of “Grackles, Goodbye” “wheel” in the “sun-glare” and “pepper the blueness” of
midday; even the falling leaves of the next memory fall “through gold light of the season’s
sun,” a unity of light and sky connecting the two moments (CP 391). “Evening Hawk,”
however, works in a more ominous, darkening hour, in which the “black angularity of
shadow” and “the last tumultuous avalanche of / Light above pines” imbue the scene with
new intensity and desperation (CP 326). Although the indented stanzas beginning with “His
wing” and “Long now” suggest the passage of time, they also establish narrative
15
progression: “His wing” leads to the shadows cast by sweeping wings, and “Long now”
introduces the anticipated shroud of darkness (CP 326). This lack of light matches the
“darkness” of the cellar, though the “steady” star separates the natural, to-be-relit nighttime
from the enforced darkness of the indoors (CP 326), a place Warren’s poems seldom go.
Unlike the contrasts of “Grackles, Goodbye” and “Evening Hawk,” “Heart of Autumn” is
inscribed in a world of grayness from which time, measured by light, is excluded. The “gray
cloud-scud” and “gray / Wind-flicker of forest” outline “the great wing-beat,” but the lack of
sun prevents the speaker from truly feeling distance between himself and the sky (CP 376);
therefore, he can metamorphose into a bird more completely than the speaker of “Evening
Hawk.” Only the sunset toward which he flies reintroduces the idea of fading time. Because
of the dull background, the geese shine; because of the flatness of a gray-washed sky, the
birds’ freedom seems accessible. Only when the “imperial utterance” is revealed to be an
“unwordable utterance,” intended to express something inexpressible, does time-awareness
reappear (CP 376). Time, deeply known, cannot be expressed; with physical limitation
comes awareness of mortality and the obstacles preventing victorious and permanent
ascendance into Time. The complete darkness in which the image of the young boy stands in
“Tell Me a Story” keeps the hope of joining earth and sky distant, though that hope
germinates when the boy hears the geese overhead amid the scattered stars.
These stars, in “Tell Me a Story” and many of Warren’s other poems, complicate the
seasonal, visual understanding of marked temporality. While stars only appear in darkness,
their light is a constant fixation for Warren. Like clocks, stars offer a simple reference (“it is
night”) that is complicated upon further understanding (the light I see shined thousands of
years ago). Just as “time” betrays the concept that lies behind it, so “stars” in their apparent
simplicity hide the enormous distance and abstractness behind them. Physicists study stars
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and black holes ceaselessly, for the space and time that they occupy falls outside of human
comprehension. “Evening Hawk” introduces the “steady” star, which sits “like Plato, over
the mountain,” all three of which descriptions appear simple and dependable to hide their
complexity (CP 326). The star’s steadiness depends more on the dismissal of the one
perceiving it. A mountain’s stability evaporates once it fades from view. And Plato, whose
philosophies reshaped understanding, cannot be forgotten but influences all thought that
comes after him.
Thus what exists in the sky and what exists on earth, though they seem distant, grow
intimately connected inside the speaker. Water, in several of the bird poems, bridges this
gap by reflecting, on earth, what catches the eye of the speaker observing the sky. In
“Grackles, Goodbye,” the leaf that drifts in the “black gloss of a mountain pool” contrasts
with the memory of the speaker’s mother, dropped like a stone in a hole in the ground (CP
391). The fallen leaf gains a new motion in the pool, which reflects the motion of birds in the
sky. Such new, delicate life mimics the speaker’s preservation of his mother in his own
mind, embodying his rebellion against the “sick lie” of her burial (CP 391). The “guttural
gorge” above which the hawk of “Evening Hawk” flies reminds the reader of the pressure of
falling time, but it also emits a noise, just as the birds do and just like the “leaking pipe in the
cellar” (CP 391). Water brings the heavens to the earth and connects ideas emerging from
the sky to the earthly landscape the thinker occupies.
Like this water, which in its reflection merges earth and sky, thematic ideas in Warren’s
poems both intensify the importance of Time and convince the reader that such a thing
exists. The reappearance of “horizon”—either the word alone or in associated words like
“sunrise” and “sunset”—brings the concrete meeting point of earth and sky back into focus.
Horizons can be both limited and limitless: they can represent the limit of the earthly
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subject’s sight even as he (often) stands in stillness. Yet the “imperial utterance” of the geese
flying “toward sunset, at a great height” in “Heart of Autumn” probes the fullness of the sky
even though the bird cannot fully comprehend it (CP 376). In pondering the horizon,
Warren shows “his nerve for both necessity and largeness,” (HLK 20) aware that what can
be seen (“time”) is not all that is (“Time”). The boundaries of the curving earth, its “spin and
tilt,” hides Time. But, in “Grackles, Goodbye,” the “undertaker’s sick lie” that a body can be
buried and forgotten is betrayed by “the teeth of Time,” which, when the sun rises and when
it sets, “convict[s] the half-wit of guilt” (CP 391). Thus the temporal regularity of the horizon
protests that memories must be forgotten, but Warren’s constant reexamination of the
horizon “confirms” the surpassing “facts” that emerge from reenacting past sunsets (CP
391).
Functioning separately but simultaneously, time and Time both influence the speaker of
“Evening Hawk” as he contemplates the sunset. Watching the hawk fly in the “Geometries
and orchids that the sunset builds,” he describes those “dipping” wings suddenly as “honed
steel-edge” that “scythes down another day” and causes “the crashless fall of stalks of Time”
(CP 326). The pressure of the setting sun’s light affords the hawk power to cut down the
day, but this day is different from the “stalks of Time,” which we do not see but “hear,”
though they lack a crash (CP 326). The harvested stalks of Time, “heavy with the gold of our
error,” suggest a positive reuse value for this error (CP 326). This sunset harvest, this end
time, allows parts of Time to recombine and reassemble usefully the next day. Later in the
poem, the star hangs “steady” on the horizon, removed from temporality (CP 326). Yet in
the still darkness, we “hear / The earth grind on its axis”: even in immobility, time passes
(CP 326).
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When placed in the context of “distance,” rather than darkness, stars mean something new.
Images of birds in Warren’s work often heighten the speaker’s awareness of distance, as the
birds of “Grackles, Goodbye” “pepper the blueness of distance” (CP 391) and the geese of
“Heart of Autumn” lift “the imperial utterance / Which cries out for distance” (CP 376). But
the distance of “Tell Me a Story” insists on “a story of great distances, and starlight” (CP
266). Suddenly distance is not only a thing for the birds. By combining steadiness and
conceptual depth, the act of stargazing collapses distance just as the birds’ flight into sunset
denies the solidity of distance. These collapses mimic the overarching collapse of physical
and emotional distance from memory that allows Warren, and his reader, to access Time (if
only momentarily).
Even as the speakers of these poems look skyward, the verbs in the poems describe
downward motion, reminiscent of the act of reading a poem. Just as one reads a poem from
top to bottom, objects in the poems fall, thereby introducing gravity and mimicking
chronological passage of time. Memories of leaves that “release / Bough-grip,” of burial in a
“hole” in the ground, counterbalance the upward gaze of the speaker of “Grackles, Goodbye”
(CP 391). Light can “avalanche” in “Evening Hawk”; the motion of the poem is a “scything
down,” a “crashless fall,” a “drip in darkness,” in which the bird’s distance from earth seems
hopeful (CP 326). Nevertheless, in the collapse of distance, flight loses its power. The
speakers of the poem either “see” or “hear” the object of which they speak, but they rarely
do both. Geese, in “Heart of Autumn,” head for “the boom, the lead pellet,” which even the
ability to fly cannot outpace (CP 376). Only “Tell Me a Story” lacks such gravity to end the
hopeful flight.
Each complication of Time turns Warren’s speakers further inward. The chaos of flight and
fall, of distance and closeness, of fading light and bright light, rarely departs from the
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personal “I” and “me” of the speaker’s individual perspective: “I watch them go,” “I
remember,” “I hear” (CP 391). Warren’s speaker constantly asks questions (“What kind of
fool would promote that kind of life?” CP 391), raises ontological concerns (“I have known
time and distance, but not why I am here,” CP 376), and interacts with his listener (as in
“Tell Me a Story,” or “Evening Hawk”). This reflective attitude demonstrates the inward
nature of the search for Time, toward an inherent quality reminiscent of the birds’
knowledge “in their nature” of “the path of pathlessness” in “Heart of Autumn” (CP 376).
Images fold upon themselves to allow the speaker’s surroundings to lead him to new ways
of depicting Time, even as they complicate his understanding of himself as mortal man.
The very personal utterance of the speaker both expresses this tension and seeks to
transcend it, just as Warren’s poems attempt to create an experience of Time despite their
inherent temporality. The “imperial utterance” of “Heart of Autumn” is in fact an
“unwordable utterance,” and the poem’s speaker recognizes that even this verbal
representation of Time in a poem emerges from a “Path of logic, path of folly, all / The
same” (CP 376). Even the ancient, “sharp hieroglyphics” of “the last bat” in “Evening Hawk”
offer an incomplete physical representation of an inexpressible and individually understood
wisdom (CP 326). The personal language of poetry that declares the existence of Time
prohibits a conclusive understanding of the concept.
Formal structures (like words) also reveal the unease with which one may write about an
unnameable idea. Across Warren’s body of work, the degree of formal experimentation
varies; different stanza forms and structures accomplish different goals. “Grackles,
Goodbye” and “Heart of Autumn” employ uniform four-line stanzas, rarely breaking up
stanzas with short lines and even, usually, ending lines with neat punctuation. Enjambments
enhance “Heart of Autumn” and dictate the rhythm of longer, more urgent sentences. In
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contrast, “Grackles, Goodbye” features more declarative sentences: observations, stated as
fact, reflect the frustrated tone of the poem. Meanwhile, the simple, declarative sentences of
“Tell Me a Story” accomplish the opposite. In isolating single sentences in their own stanzas,
often repeating the same idea, the rhythm of the poem grows hopeful and inquisitive (CP
266). Each approach develops the tone of the speaker as he regards the world around him
and faces the less penetrable world behind those visions.
Though most of Warren’s poems do not feature rhyme, “Grackles, Goodbye” is a notable
exception, offering declarative sentences, regular stanzas, and predictable A/B/A/B rhyme.
The singsong quality of these rhymes contributes to his caged frustration with Time. In “Tell
Me a Story,” however, unrhymed lines, gapped with unpredictable spacing, help the reader
sense the freedom of space and distance in Time.
The frame of the poem, in its imagery, theme, and form, probes the idea of Time while
inscribing it within a new set of limits: words. Thus the temporality of the poem limits the
its ability to neatly describe Time. Nevertheless, the poem’s flexibility offers the best chance
to bend those limits. By formally bending the time of the poem, the poet briefly enters Time;
as he resurfaces and ends the poem, his experience in the coexistence of memories and
sensations allows him to make sense of the echoing themes of the passing life he once
thought to escape.
III. “That joy in which all joys should rejoice”
Warren’s poetic flights into Time spring from a deeply “personal” and “emotional” source
most immediately identifiable in his ready and repeated reconstructions of intimate visual
memories (Pritchard 108). Juxtaposed with the “summer’s depthless azure” and “the golden
21
paradox of air unmoving,” testimonies to “the nature of Time” and “Pure Being that, by
being, our being denies” in the middle of such poems not only disorient the comfortable
reader but also, on occasion, turn him away (CP 431). To render these terms sensible again,
the creative imagination weaves material sublimity and earthly experience into Time,
whose indefinable existence shapes Warren’s quest for answers to intrinsic, aching, and
emotional questions about Being.
A deep and repeating concern with Time emerged quickly in Warren’s body of work and
then matured both with Warren’s own age and with the changing sensibilities of his
contemporaries. In the Vanderbilt years, Warren worshipped T.S. Eliot, who, as he wrote to
Harold Bloom in a response to Anxiety of Influence, he saw as “his precursor” (Davis 69), to
the Chagrin of John Crowe Ransom. Poetry, among the Fugitives, “was an impersonal
activity—as Eliot had put it, an escape from personality” that might seem, to readers
attuned to the emotional element of Warren’s poetry, nearly impossible (Davis 74). The
Agrarians and New Critics rejected the sufficiency of poems to function as just personal;
from memory an “intense emotional burden” must emerge in the poem (Davis 74). Though
Warren abandoned his Eliot impersonation quickly, this commitment to intensity within the
poem remained.
Modernist poetry rebelled against the structure of traditionally metered poetry, which
encourages a sense of regularized chronology. If “clocks detached time-measurement from
natural elements and processes” (West-Pavlov 17), then the movement away from
predictable rhythms, punctuation, stanza construction, and visual orientation that detaches
Modernist poetry from the conventional clock suggests the insufficiency of that clock. These
changes made a strong argument that traditional temporal and spatial arrangement could
not sufficiently express beauty, sublimity, pain, and other poetic messages. Warren’s Time
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emerged in this poetic environment. As the cultural sensibility in America shifted “from the
highbrow, densely intellectual” modern aesthetic to the “loosely structured, transparently
readable style” that prevailed toward the end of his life, Warren’s desire to confront the
ambiguity of Time persisted (Davis 74). Aging shifted Warren’s attitude toward the idea; the
mysteries that accompany the threat of death added a new intensity to Warren’s use of
Time in the quest to understand “the nature of Being” beyond his temporal lifetime (CP
431).
For Warren, poetry was a working out of ideas. Concerning his approach to selecting subject
matter, Warren once told an interviewer that the best stories have a meaning “you haven’t
quite laid your hands on,” which allows writing to become “your way of understanding it”
(Core xciv). He wrote a book about Jefferson Davis because “It’s only the guy who’s angular,
incomplete, and struggling who has a story”; this “guy,” in Warren’s intrinsically personal
poetry, is himself (Core xciv-xcv). The “incomplete” and “struggling,” but still obsessive,
individual confronts his own abyss seeking “value and meaning” (Clements 54). Within a
single poem, each word connects to the others; but through the repetition of Time, each
poem also joins with others as part of the story of their author. From the smallest detail
emerges an experimental but urgent web of meaning. In a 1956 Paris Review interview,
Warren told Eugene Walter and Ralph Ellison that poetry ultimately compelled him because
of “the feeling that poetry was a vital activity, that it related to ideas and to life” (Walter and
Ellison).
This “vital” quality of poetry kept Warren’s most sentimental poems serious. Warren
scoffed at mere experimentation in both form and content, telling Ellison and Walter: “I
don’t know what is meant by the word ‘experiment’; you ought to be playing for keeps”
(Walter and Ellison). Poetry begins to be, for Warren, a matter of life and death: man’s
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“predicament of lacking sufficient knowledge in time” is a vital source of Warren’s poetry
(Clements 51). Inherent and ironic in each poem is the desire to escape the fact of life (time,
the approach to death) by accessing a new life (Time, outside of death). Warren defies
temporality by stringing disparate moments together in their commonalities; in so doing he
defies the temporal nature of the body, if only momentarily, and enacts a different kind of
presence, or Being, within Time.
The enthusiasm with which Warren recognizes these ideas (Time, Truth, Being) beyond his
understanding varies from poem to poem—and is read differently from critic to critic.
Bedient admires “Warren’s passion to feel the flow from every least tributary of his being
into the fullness of his fate, his lust to know Truth,” which “would return him to the origins
of life through the completest intercourse with the real,” and identifies in his body of work a
well-packaged and hopeful flight like the one in “Heart of Autumn” (“Greatness and Robert
Penn Warren” 336-7). Morton Zabel reads, on the other hand, a “tragic vision that defines a
faith without dictating it,” which offers a horrifyingly ambiguous but unfortunately accurate
paraphrase of Warren’s work (Zabel 40). Either by generalizing, as Bedient does, or by
making noncommittal statements, as Zabel does, readers may miss Warren’s particular
perspective on Time that still allows each interrelated poem to offer an individual and
momentary perspective.
Such constant interrelatedness across poems tempts readers to believe that Time, memory,
reality, emotion, and perspective, because they belong to one individual (Warren), can be
reduced to a single meaningful “faith” or system of belief. But Warren’s poems function both
individually and as parts of a collected body of work, just as his being, bound by time, plays
a role in a different state of Being, accessed by Time. This paradox centers Warren’s poetry;
his feelings on that paradox vary from poem to poem.
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One of the most evocative of these poems, printed in the aptly named Being Here and
published during Warren’s seventh decade, consciously embraces such paradox. The
speaker in “Acquaintance with Time in Early Autumn” approaches Time’s connection to
temporality with the hesitation of a wise older man whose boldness falters like a falling leaf
or failing heart. The first words, “Never—yes, never—before the months just passed” recall
the storytelling tradition of “Tell Me a Story,” but this time they evoke a skeptical hesitation.
The speaker of the poem must reassure himself of the reality of his own memory, which is
destabilized by age. Already, the fact of age and being-in-time casts the speaker’s selfknowledge (and Warren’s) in doubt.
Nonetheless, he continues describing “the nature of Time” that he has “known” in “these
months just passed” (CP 431); Time, not new to the speaker, has shifted, allowing the
speaker to “know” its “nature” and feel “its strong heart” anew (CP 431). It (Time) lacks a
“face, or shape, or history,” but he feels and knows intimately the “heart” of “Pure Being,”
known intimately but still separate from his aging self (CP 431). Such “Pure Being,” like
Time, is known but incomprehensible because it, “by being, our being denies” (CP 431), not
encompassed in a face, a shape, or a history. The very line, “Pure Being that, by being, our
being denies” (CP 431), perplexes a reader who does not know Time or Pure Being—the
reader who, like Pritchard and Absher, does not share Warren’s or his speaker’s abstract
perspective. How does one “know” Time and Pure Being, when time and being prevent them
from being held, described, or contained?
“Acquaintance with Time in Early Autumn” continues, inscribing experience (and, now,
knowledge) of Time and Pure Being back into physical scenery. The initial image refers to
past memories of “a girl’s inner thigh,” but the poem also calls up images examined in past
poems and fiction: dark mountain pools, colorful leaves that fall slowly, and cries of joy (CP
25
431). After establishing the mystery of Time and Being in the first stanza, Warren taps
skillfully into his bank of images to describe an endless (yet fleeting) summer in which his
courage rises and falls. Each element of the energetic summer bursts with steady, secure
rhythm (lines 6-12). Here, one seems to know this Pure Being, this joyful Time. But even in
the “muscular flexion and heart’s hilarity, / White to the black ammoniac purity of / A
mountain pool,” the speaker notices the “leaf stem” that, amid the fulfillment of “the field,
the heart, the womb,” “dries” “infinitesimally,” passing toward death. The fertile fulfillment
of that energetic rhythm now seems a march toward death. This death renders the
enjambment of line 12, “A mountain pool. But black,” a meaningful interruption, as what
was blue (alive) simultaneously appears black. Temporal being reasserts its dominance.
“What we saw,” of course, is the about-to-fall leaf, “hanging” “at the timeless instant,”
suddenly frozen again (CP 431). Here the poetic voice inserts itself in agony: “Voices of joy
how distant seem!” (CP 431). Both the “cries of joy of companions” and less tangible “voices
of joy” seem distant in timelessness. If the leaf hung in Time, all those voices might coexist.
But because the leaf is now timeless, like a stopped heart, the confused speaker cries to
break the anxious moment of a leaf on the brink of fall (death) (CP 431). The single leaf is
“flame-red” “above summer’s bulge of green,” clearly anomalous and disconcerting; about to
fall, it is out of place in its world (CP 431). The water to which it will fall turns “suddenly”
black (CP 431). This black mountain pool recalls the black pool in “Grackles, Goodbye,” a
poem that affirms the sense that what is seen may also be something else after a new
association with another memory or a change in perspective.
Each time the speaker of the poem becomes aware of mortality once again, the blackness of
the water reveals his anxiety, its “cold claw” reaching “ghostly up” “to pierce / The heart”
(CP 431). The invocation of the heart, though this time pierced and vulnerable, calls to mind
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Time’s strong, enlivening “heart” that the speaker experiences in the first stanza. The
mortality of the leaf ties into the speaker’s mortality; is the “single drop” a drop of poison?
An elixir of life? The desperation of the enjambment from stanza four to stanza five suggests
the former, that the speaker fears an impending doom. In fact, his urgency for the leaf to
cling on parallels an unrecognized urgency for the body to cling on to the surface of the
water; the delicate balance of floating reflects the delicate leaf stem, and the speaker feels
desperately its readiness to fall. The beginning of the next sentence – “For I have felt knee
creak on a stair” – solidifies this connection, as the speaker acknowledges his age through
physical aching and lack of appeal to young women. “Whose dream” does he describe? Did
these memories ever really happen? How did he end up here, on the border of air and
water, floating and sinking, life and death?
But in this moment of tension, light reappears. A very short line – “the sun” – pauses the
progress of the poem and recalls the bright, hopeful summer (CP 431). Then, the short line
“The sun / Pours down on the leaf its lacquer of Chinese red” emphasizes the beauty of the
particular moment. The heart cannot decide on anxiety or awe, a constant and honest
conflict that renders the poem confusing but genuine to human experience. After this pause,
readers must decide in which tone to proceed with the action of “then.”
Again doubting himself, the speaker tells his reader “I feel that I see, even in / The golden
paradox of air unmoving,” the release of the leaf. An encounter with timelessness casts
actual time into doubt; the fact that the speaker feels that he sees harkens back to his feeling
the strong heart of Time. When what cannot be (timelessness) combines with what is
(time), the speaker can only feel that he sees the leaf “trust / a shining destiny,” a Time that
offers alternative hope (CP 431). Superimposing the two, the speaker experiences an
“Acquaintance with Time” that renders all certainty suspect. The leaf is “too moorless not to
27
fall. But / Does not”; nothing can be inevitable, including a fall that is in fact inevitable (CP
431). If the speaker uses the leaf as a figure for his own life, then his illusion that what must
fall will not fall denies the imminence of death. But then, in the same line that it “does not”
fall, the leaf begins to fall “minutely” “while ages pass” (CP 432). When the leaf touches the
water, “Breath / Comes back” to suggest a new and different life. Curiously, amid the “black”
water, which the speaker now “knows” is black, he “hates” the incomprehensible forces of
“God” and “gravity” (CP 432).
If life on a tree branch is “being,” full of tension and anxiety, then touching on the cold black
water should be a blessed relief. Since the speaker himself floats on the surface of the black
water and knows that it, too, is an unstable surface with unknown and fearful depths, this
end after the fall of the leaf becomes frustrating rather than comfortable. Beyond the leaf’s
temporal “being,” the speaker cannot fathom the “Pure Being” of that black mountain pool
and the Time he experiences momentarily while he lies in it. The inability to know is exactly
how the Warren’s speaker knows Pure Being, beyond conventional life cycles. Questions
crowd in.
The first, “How shall we know the astrolabe of joy?” again ties into the rest of Warren’s
work by subtly incorporating the poet’s preoccupations with stars (CP 432). An “astrolabe,”
a device intended to map their positions, would allow the speaker to measure and possess
joy (CP 432); if Warren could measure and control the arrangement of the world, he could
find constant joy. The speaker’s inability to chart even his own life, however, suggests that
these efforts are also hopeless. As if to prove this point, the last question of the poem is
difficult to map out: “Who would have thought” that the “heart” would pick “today as
payday?” (CP 432). This two-sided “payday,” “two-faced” like the black and blue mountain
pool or the leaf undergirded only by wind, is as unmappable as the stars (CP 432). Joy and
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death are equally unpredictable; still, however, the “heart” picks (feels) “today” to be the
payday (CP 432). This heart is not Warren’s own, but the heart of Time that holds maps and
diagrams, possesses what cannot be possessed by the “being” inscribed in his body, no
matter how much he knows Time. Pure Being seems so close, yet remains unknowable by
the corporeal being. Warren’s poetic enactments of Time are not eternal, but bound by the
temporality out of which they emerge and to which he must return. Though Time is ever
present, full presence within it and the resulting experience of Being requires stopping the
ticking clock. In Warren’s poetry, this paralysis, which then opens to the throbbing life of
Time, arrives when the images of the loud world string together across the lines of time.
Because of the deep and anxious experience of being and impending non-being depicted in
the poem, both speaker and reader make an acquaintance with Time and the “Pure Being”
that lies within it. Warren never gives up his preoccupation with time that is at once
Modernist (like Eliot, constantly apprehending time) and Southern (like Faulkner, burdened
by the influence of history). But as he ages and as the postmodern perspective intensifies,
Warren’s preoccupation with Time collides with postmodern concerns of being; the two
inform one another uniquely in Warren’s work. Being, beyond understanding, and Time,
beyond technique, form the joyful and haunting core of Warren’s poetry. Those who enjoy
only the imagery of a Warren poem tire quickly in repeated images. The miracle of Warren’s
poetry is the revelation of parallel Time and Being that, despite unconquerable distance,
readers experience where they stand.
Warren’s idea of Time embraces an intangible and deeply engrained sense that the
repetitions within memory and history emerge not just from impersonal chance. Exploring
these atemporal lines constantly amends the being’s knowledge of itself, as:
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History, all time, and the cruel, inescapable fact of death are to be incorporated in
and by the living. Acceptance, indeed affirmation, of the past and of change or
transience, is essential to successful self definition, that is, to knowing one’s deep,
regenerate self, that ‘unself which was self,’ ‘that darkness of sleep which/Is the
past, and is/The self.’ Self-knowledge, in turn, gives direction to the future and
induces in one, as in Audubon, a capacity more fully to love and sympathize.
(Clements 61)
Clements sees the development of a Warren poem as a journey that ends positively, in a
march from “darkness to death,” through the “inexplicable violence” of human flesh, and
into “rebirth, truth, selfhood, even joy” (Clements 62). This is an incomplete analysis of
Warren’s body of work. Particularly in later poems, like “Acquaintance with Time in Early
Autumn,” the “epiphanic,” “extraordinary,” and “transcendent” “spots of time” do not end in
a kind of joyful victory (Clements 62). The “fuller being” at the end of Time poems
accompanies emerges from the thrill of intangible knowledge (“Grackles, Goodbye”), but
that intangibility can also be a source of endless torment.
Joy as objective seems a popular paraphrase of Warren’s poetry for critics like
Jackson and Bedient, but it falls short. To the reader for whom “being here” is sufficient, “his
spruce-fragrant poetry is a refuge for the sentiment of being—a sanctuary for the joy of
being here” (“Greatness in Robert Penn Warren” 334). A “sanctuary,” however, suggests a
certainty or faith that Warren, especially in his later poetry, lacks; the joy of the present will
never be free from anguish, “for the past exists not only as past but simultaneously with the
present in the sense that, being a part of the present self, it influences the present, as it and
the present shape the future” (Clements 60). While Bedient admires Warren’s ability to be
“open about the terror in his heart” he nonetheless insists that “jubilation swam in his
limbs” as he “[stood] out in the rain of Time, tragically exposed to it” (“Greatness in Robert
30
Penn Warren” 334-5). The victory of joy in such instances renders Being Here a glorious
title for Bedient; what he forgets, however, is the inescapable anxiety of non-being that
accompanies the Warrenian view of Time (unnameable) and Being (unfathomable). For
Bedient, joy, in the poems, “overcomes” “the blackness of anxiety” (“Greatness in Robert
Penn Warren” 335). He forgets the black mountain pool and the black underside of a “twofaced coin”: the terror of non-being that joy never fully overcomes.
Instability, therefore, restricts efforts to define Time and prevents it from
overcoming the reality of time’s threat to being. Nonetheless, Warren’s dogged creativity in
the face of that threat embodies a unique poetic courage. Time, and the Pure Being found in
it, remain indescribable and unutterable. Warren cannot “trust / A shining destiny” of Being
hidden vaguely in Time when the reality and anxiety of temporality can always be written in
perfect clarity. Despite this state of affairs, he must continue.
IV. “Great distances, and starlight”
Excavating a deeply felt sense, ironically, requires creation for poets like Warren. As his
poems look outward, into stars, landscapes, and birds, they also yearn courageously inward.
The “astrolabe of joy,” therefore, maps both inside and outside, superimposing Warren’s
interior vision onto the stars and condensing celestial space into the soul of one man. When
the scaffolds of time and space come down, thrilling and terrifying possibility opens anew in
the interior abyss of self. Yet in seeking to understand that space, created art limits its own
capacity to inscribe it; both poetry and poet become autonomous actors in the paradoxical
practice of losing and finding self.
Discussions of Warren’s poetry often ignore such blurred lines: Warren either discovers
something, or he discovers himself. Often, Bedient calls Warren’s poetry “redemptive,”
31
using (again) a religiously oriented word to describe his poetry (this time, the word comes
from several of Warren’s critical articles on Romanticism). But who is redeemed, and who is
redeemer, in the Warrenian circumstance? Such readings suggest that Warren controls the
trajectory of his poetry to seek a resolution of an internal conflict, to fix something broken.
He does the opposite: his actions tear down orienting structures, revealing elements beyond
his control. In this space, the poem both frees the poet (by opening the imaginative space)
and fetters him in the art he has created. Rather than resolving dissociation, poetry
unearths the parallel Time and Being that are profoundly connected to him but remain
constantly, often achingly, obscured.
In Warren’s own writings on poetry, he recognizes the power of poetry as both expressive
and creative. The “great forms” of nature function “not merely as vehicles for
transcendental meaning” but as participants “in the reality which they render intelligible,”
and, likewise, poetry allows poets and readers not to create a new transcendence but to see
and experience the transcendence of which they are already a part, if they can shift
perspective enough to see (Selected Essays 249). Time and Being are not simply suppressed
or undiscovered; they “lean at us” constantly, using “images” in the world to urge the
individual to grow aware of them (CP 312).
Perhaps the most impenetrable of Warren’s poems, “Snowshoeing Back to Camp in
Gloaming,” exhibits Time’s omnipresence. The lack of clear structure allows the speaker of
the poem to vacillate between the inward Time and the outer world. At first, thick sounds
plod like heavy, snowshoed steps; the enjambment of “I / Stopped,” however, takes the
motion of a day’s work and, with the delicate “I” sound and the subsequent paused action,
returns the reader to the familiar scene of a poet looking upon his surroundings (CP 393).
“Westward” he stares, facing the waning sun, “clear yet of the peak-snagged horizon” (CP
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393). The predictable contrast of “white alabaster unblemished” and “blackness of spruce
forest” sets off the second description of the sun, which stands out in its obscurity. Once
merely “unmoving,” the sun is now “by a spectral spectrum belted, / Pale in its ghost-nimb”
(CP 393). The orienting sun, “spectral” and “nimb,” adopts (particularly in the antiquated
“nimb”) an extreme, haloed otherworldliness that thrusts the quotidian description toward
inward imaginative space.
In an instant, “the shadow of spruces” is “magenta,” and the tone of the poem shifts from
celebratory to exploratory (CP 393). Shadows, whose length indicates the passage of time,
bleed “in motionlessness,” a paradoxical combination of active verb and inactive noun (CP
393). Even if the viewer remains motionless, the world around him cannot stop bleeding,
and shadows (which indicate chronological time) continue to shift across the landscape;
motionlessness would mean timelessness, but neither is possible. The next line, isolated,
summarizes the state of affairs: “Time died in my heart” (CP 393).
If such a line, set off in its own stanza, could put an end to the spatial and temporal
confusion, Warren could perhaps escape the Time with which he is obsessed. Instead, the
speaker of “Snowshoeing” maps the world without Time (at least, the Time in the speaker’s
own heart). The poem launches back into this space, on the “knife-edge frontier / Of
Timelessness” which may be either a physical frontier or a mental and spiritual one (CP
393). The exterior, natural world combines with the interior: “the life I might live” is not
only a place but a time “ahead,” and the “be-nimbed and frozen sun” is not only a physical
illuminator but also an interior presence indicating, “nimbed,” the inevitable passage of time
(CP 393). Yet the speaker, in whom “Time” dies, cannot “move / Into the terror of unmarred
whiteness” into which none have yet ventured but which may yet lead him home (CP 393).
33
Meanwhile, “behind” the Timeless speaker, space and time combine in “old words forgotten
in snowdrifts” (CP 394). Ironically, though the past flows backward behind him, the “perfect
knowledge” to the east is a “garrote,” a slow strangulation (CP 394). The space and time that
stand behind, which he could occupy in Time, become a place of backward motion and
death. “But,” amid the repeated death imagery, “the crow in distance” calls the speaker forth
(CP 394). The east, birthplace of the sun, is long past, dead; the west, with its impending
death, still promises some life.
The geography of the poem, which has defined east and west by the Timelessness of one
instant, lurches skyward. After the always-important bird calls, the narrator describes the
fulfillment of the inevitable change that first established the poem’s anxiety: a great shift of
magenta turning pink, then gray. Darkness defeats the horizon and the speaker of the poem
still stands, motionless and Timeless, watching the “last lone twinge / Of pink on the
elephant-gray,” and recognizing the physical similarity of ahead and behind, future and past,
west and east, under the “One star” that causes him to stare “starward” (CP 394).
To stand in Timelessness, then, is to become lost in darkness without a track to follow
home. In the map of the poem, the fifth dimension, up, represents a mystery where even
“Space and God / Flinch to come, and where / Un-Time roars like a wind that only / The
dead, unweeping, hear” (CP 394). Such words seem, like so much of the poem and so much
of Warren’s poetry, impenetrable. If the speaker of the poem stands in Timelessness and
knows of “Un-Time” above that “The dead, unweeping, hear,” then perhaps the death of the
poem is complete; his tracklessness, the death of Time, the death of the mystical sun, means
that he, too, has died (CP 394). In this death, this starward silence, he cries out to history of
thought, and asks Pascal: “What does a man need to forget?” (CP 394). Blaise Pascal, to
defend God’s existence based on equations of probability, needed to forget to find surety.
34
At this crux of the poem, with a completed map of motion and motionlessness, Time and
Timelessness and Un-Time, all the speaker can do is, finally, “move on” while also
“remembering.” He returns to the forward-and-backward conversation of motion and
memory, which brings forth a light “of a source far other than firelight – or even //
Imagined star-glint” (394). The final three stanzas of the poem embrace the once-frustrating
Time that, the poet has learned in his attempt to escape its fearsome scale, offers the only
way to truly live. Somewhere hidden within memories, a light lingers, worth the discovery
and burning, indescribable, both in past and future, in physical form and in the spirit. In the
fading light of gloaming, the speaker of the poem blends space and time so that the frontiers
of past and present collapse into one another. There, he experiences Time and ponders the
dark death of Timelessness; when the light of the natural world resumes its motion he is
reinscribed in temporality, left with only the memory of the Time in which all spaces and
moments meet.
Thus “Snowshoeing Back to Camp in Gloaming” maps both physically (east and west) and
mentally (time and Time) the state of a mind that experiences all parts of the map. The
poem displays a thought progression: motionlessness, timelessness, loss of Time, awareness
of Time spatially behind, the call of a crow, a look forward (spatially and temporally),
motion in surroundings, time in surroundings, darkness, a look upward, a crisis—and,
finally, a hopeful memory and forward movement. The loss of Time, whatever it is, reorients
life around the hope of regaining it.
Even in the anguish that its mystery contains, Time, for Warren, is also vitality. He may seek
truth, and do so ceaselessly, but that search is the catalyst for experience, experience the
basis of his created art. Rather than offering a necessarily hopeful end or a closed-circuit
35
roadmap to make his life tolerable, Warren explores limitlessness by revisiting the scenes,
objects, and sounds that first pushed the limits in his heart.
In the middle of the decade during which Warren published the poems examined in this
paper, he also published Democracy & Poetry, in which he explains the requisite
uncertainties of poetry that inscribe or express the self. Though poetry as an act “helps one
to grasp reality and to grasp one’s own life,” it will not “give definitions and certainties”
(Democracy & Poetry 92). Curiously, then, the poem reaches toward understanding of the
self and its deep-seated relation to the world, but this exploration is merely a way to
“ponder on what Saint Augustine meant when he said that he was a question to himself”
(Democracy & Poetry 92). Although Warren views poetry as a means of understanding the
self, he concludes by the 1970s that the “working out” that motivates so much of his poetry
and inspires so many of his Time poems lacks a concise end. Indeed, several poems in Being
Here and Now & Then offer more questions than answers. Nonetheless, these questions both
aptly depict the poet’s spirit and challenge the reader, as in the last stanza of “Prairie
Harvest”:
So you stand in the infinite circle, star after star,
And standing alone in starlight, can you devise
An adequate definition of self, whatever you are? (CP 422)
Warren calls this jumble of selfhood “the poet’s own disorganization,” which the poem
reorganizes to “[evoke] mysterious echoes in the selves of those who are drawn to it”
(Democracy & Poetry 69). This strong sense of a self beyond the physical and temporal being
inspires poetry, Warren writes; to communicate Time despite the slowly decaying body, to
36
“struggle” to understand the self beyond the self, is “the human signature,” “what gives the
aesthetic organization its numinousness” (Democracy & Poetry 69). In this sense, to Warren
the process of self-discovery in poetry, no matter how dense its terminology becomes, is the
very thing that allows readers, too, to “feel that the ‘made thing’ nods mysteriously at us, at
the deepest personal inward self” (Democracy & Poetry 69). A reader should feel a poem in
an inward place.
Though Warren saw himself as “a yearner,” his approach to poetry assumes a sense of
yearning within his reader, too (Connely 211). The effect of the “made thing” on the reader
should be expansive, not reductive; a poem “stands as a perennial possibility of experience,
available whenever we turn to it” which, when one “opens” one’s imagination, “provides the
freshness and immediacy of experience that returns us to ourselves” (Democracy & Poetry
72). Though Warren’s excavations reflect his own preoccupations, he treats such
preoccupations as universal and interconnected across poems and across lives. The Time
poem asks its reader, as Jack Burden urges at the end of All the King’s Men, to “go out of the
house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful
responsibility of Time” (All the King’s Men 609).
And the undefined word, like the unanswered question, functions as vehicle to enact the
unutterable Time to which one is drawn, compelled, and inextricably bound. For Warren the
power of a poem on a reader lies in “the imaginative enactment that stirs the deepest
recesses where life-will and values reside,” an innate and, again, felt identification “from the
secret physical echo in muscle and nerve that identifies us with the medium” (Democracy &
Poetry 89):
As both Rilke and Yeats have put it, the making of a work represents a
37
plunge into the ‘abyss of the self.’ And once the work is made, the reader, insofar as
he gives himself to it, takes such a plunge, too—the plunge to explore the
possibilities of his own ‘abyss.’ In the complexity of this whole situation we find,
then, echo upon echo, or mirror facing mirror. But in the end, as Henri Bergson once
said, the work returns us—the readers, the spectators—‘into our own presence.’
(Democracy & Poetry 71)
In the physical pause of “presence,” Warren finds Time enacted through the inward
“plunge.” Once the walls of time collapse upon one another, the poet and reader see in Time
their own “abyss,” in which, in the words of Burden, “nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost”
(All the King’s Men 319). Each experience of Time allows the reader and the speaker of the
poem to hear the echoes of their lives as music, to see the images in the mirror of every
poem commingle as they lean in “from the world’s wall, and Time’s” (CP 312).
Seth, principal figure in Warren’s short story “Blackberry Winter,” describes the experience
of Time from his nine-year-old perspective, in which “what you remember seems forever;
for you remember everything and everything is important and stands big and full and fills
up Time” (“Blackberry Winter” 63). Robert Penn Warren seeks, in poetry, to return to this
world made up of Time. Like the middle-aged Seth, who has followed the tramp “all these
years” (“Blackberry Winter” 87), and like Burden, who longs to escape from the burdens of
his own corruption, Warren uses his poems to bust against the walls of elapsed time to
discover Time anew. Warren’s Being, and the expanse of Time in which it dances for joy, is
trapped by the nature of the body in which it is contained. In his poetry, the longings of
Warren’s most iconic characters become his own. This story of Time—its struggle, its
victory, and its shortcoming—does not end with temporal inscription in a poem. This is the
“story of deep delight.”
38
Works Cited
Absher, Tom. “World Enough.” Ploughshares 6.4 (1981): 228-242. JSTOR. Web. 14
January 2014.
Bedient, Calvin. “Greatness and Robert Penn Warren.” The Sewanee Review 89.3
(Summer 1981): 332-346. JSTOR. Web. 11 December 2013.
Bedient, Calvin. In the Heart’s Last Kingdom: Robert Penn Warren’s Major Poetry.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Print.
Bergson, Henri. “Time and Free Will: The Idea of Duration.” Henri Bergson: Key
Writings. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey. New York: Continuum,
2002. 49-80. Print.
Burt, John ed. The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1998. Print.
Clements, A.L. “Sacramental Vision: The Poetry of Robert Penn Warren.” South Atlantic
39
Bulletin 43.3 (November 1978): 47-65. JSTOR. Web. 11 December 2013.
Connely, Thomas L. “Of Bookish Men and Fugitives.” Conversations. Ed. Gloria L.
Cronin and Ben Siegel. University of Mississippi Press: Jackson, 2005. 204217. Print.
Core, George. “Robert Penn Warren and the Drama of the Past.” The Sewanee Review
89.3 (Summer 1981): xciii-xcv. JSTOR. Web. 10 February 2014.
Davis, David A. “T.S. Eliot and Pyre of Youth: The Fugitive Poetry of Robert Penn
Warren.” The Southern Literary Journal 32.1 (Fall 1999): 69-76. JSTOR. Web. 11
December 2013.
Jackson, Richard. “The Generous Time: Robert Penn Warren and the Phenomenology of
the Moment.” boundary 9.2 (Winter 1981): 1-30. JSTOR. Web. 11 December
2013.
Pritchard, William H. “Weighing the Verse.” Poetry 138.2 (May 1981): 107-116. JSTOR.
Web. 14 January 2014.
Strandberg, Victor. “Warren’s Osmosis.” Criticism: a Quarterly for Literature and the
Arts 10.1 (Winter 1968): 23-40. Web. 6 April 2014.
Walter, Eugene and Ellison, Ralph. “Robert Penn Warren, The Art of Fiction No. 18.”
The Paris Review 16 (Spring/Summer 1957): Web. 10 February 2014.
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Warren, Robert Penn. All the King’s Men. Harcourt, Inc.: New York, 2001. Print.
Warren, Robert Penn. Democracy & Poetry. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1975.
Print.
Warren, Robert Penn. Selected Essays. Random House: New York, 1958. Print.
West-Pavlov, Russell. Temporalities. Routledge: New York, 2013. Print.
Zabel, Morton Dauwen. “Problems of Knowledge: Thirty-Six Poems by Robert Penn
Warren.” Poetry 48:1 (April 1936): 37-41. JSTOR. Web. 11 December 2013.
Appendix
Grackles, Goodbye
(from Being Here, 1980)
Black of grackles glints purple as, wheeling in sun-glare,
The flock splays away to pepper the blueness of distance.
Soon they are lost in the tracklessness of air.
41
I watch them go. I stand in my trance.
Another year gone. In trance of realization,
I remember once seeing a first fall leaf, flame-red, release
Bough-grip, and seek, through gold light of the season’s sun,
Black gloss of a mountain pool, and there drift in peace.
Another year gone. And once my mother’s hand
Held mine while I kicked the piled yellow leaves on the lawn
And laughed, not knowing some yellow-leaf season I’d stand
And see the hole filled. How they spread their obscene fake lawn.
Who needs the undertaker’s sick lie
Flung thus in the teeth of Time, and the earth’s spin and tilt?
What kind of fool would promote that kind of life?
Even sunrise and sunset convict the half-wit of guilt.
Grackles, goodbye! The sky will be vacant and lonely
Till again I hear your horde’s rusty creak high above,
Confirming the year’s turn and the fact that only, only,
In the name of Death do we learn the true name of Love.
42
Heart of Autumn
(from Now and Then, 1978)
Wind finds the northwest gap, fall comes.
Today, under gray cloud-scud and over gray
Wind-flicker of forest, in perfect formation, wild geese
Head for a land of warm water, the boom, the lead pellet.
Some crumple in air, fall. Some stagger, recover control,
Then take the last glide for a far glint of water. None
Knows what has happened. Now, today, watching
How tirelessly V upon V arrows the season’s logic,
Do I know my own story? At least, they know
When the hour comes for the great wing-beat. Sky-strider,
Star-strider—they rise, and the imperial utterance,
Which cries out for distance, quivers in the wheeling sky.
That much they know, and in their nature know
43
The path of pathlessness, with all the joy
Of destiny fulfilling its own name.
I have known time and distance, but not why I am here.
Path of logic, path of folly, all
The same—and I stand, my face lifted now skyward,
Hearing the high beat, my arms outstretched in the tingling
Process of transformation, and soon tough legs,
With folded feet, trail in the sounding vacuum of passage,
And my heart is impacted with a fierce impulse
To unwordable utterance—
Toward sunset, at a great height.
Evening Hawk
44
(From Can I See Arcturus From Where I Stand? 1975)
From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak’s black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.
His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.
The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.
Look! Look! He is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.
Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom
Is ancient, too, and immense. The star
Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.
If there were no wind we might, we think, hear
45
The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.
VI. Tell Me a Story
(from Audubon: A Vision, 1968)
[A]
Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
The great geese hoot northward.
I could not see them, there being no moon
And the stars sparse. I heard them.
46
I did not know what was happening in my heart.
It was the season before the elderberry blooms,
Therefore they were going north.
The sound was passing northward.
[B]
Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
47
Acquaintance with Time in Early Autumn
(from Being Here, 1980)
Never—yes, never—before these months just passed
Had I known the nature of Time, and felt its strong heart,
Stroke by stroke, against my own, like love,
But love without face, or shape, or history—
Pure Being that, by being, our being denies.
Summer fulfills the field, the heart, the womb,
While summerlong, infinitesimally,
Leaf stem, at bough-juncture, dries,
Even as our tireless bodies plunge,
With delicious muscular flexion and heart’s hilarity,
White to the black ammoniac purity of
A mountain pool. But black
Is blue as it stares up at summer’s depthless azure,
At the timeless instant hanging
At arc height.
Voices of joy how distant seem!
I float, pubic hair awash, and gaze
48
At one lone leaf, flame-red—the first—alone
Above summer’s bulge of green,
High-hung against the sky.
Yes, sky was blue, but water, I suddenly felt,
Was black, and striped with cold, and one cold claw
Reached ghostly up
To find my flesh, to pierce
The heart, as though
Releasing, in that dark inwardness,
A single drop. Oh, leaf,
Cling on! For I have felt knee creak on stair,
And sometimes, dancing, notice how rarely
A girl’s inner thigh will brush my own,
Like a dream. Whose dream?
The sun
Pours down on the leaf its lacquer of Chinese red.
Then, in the lucent emptiness,
While cries of joy of companions fade,
I feel that I see, even in
The golden paradox of air unmoving,
Each tendon of that stem, by its own will,
Release
Its tiny claw-hooks, and trust
A shining destiny. The leaf—it is
49
Too moorless not to fall. But
Does not. Minutely,
It slides—calm, calm—along the air sidewise,
Sustained by the kiss of under-air.
While ages pass, I watch the red-gold leaf,
Sunlit, descend to water I know is black.
It touches. Breath
Comes back, and I hate God
As much as gravity or the great globe’s tilt.
How shall we know the astrolabe of joy?
Shall gratitude run forward as well as back?
Who once would have thought that the heart,
Still ravening on the world’s provocation and beauty, might,
After time long lost
In the tangled briars of youth,
Have picked today as payday, the payment
In life’s dime-thin, thumb-worn, two-sided, two-faced coin?
50
Snowshoeing Back to Camp in Gloaming
(from Being Here, 1980)
Scraggle and brush broken through, snow-shower jarred loose
To drape shoulders, dead boughs, snow-sly and trap-laid,
Snatching thongs of my snowshoes, I
Stopped. At the edge of the high mountain mowing,
I stood. Westward stared
At the half mile of white alabaster unblemished
To the blackness of spruce forest lifting
In a long scree-climb to cliff-thrust,
Where snow, in level striation of ledges, stretched, and the sun,
Unmoving, hung
Clear yet of the peak-snagged horizon—
The sun, by a spectral spectrum belted,
51
Pale in its ghost-nimb.
The shadow of spruces, magenta,
Bled at me in motionlessness
Across unmarred white of the mowing.
Time died in my heart.
So I stood on that knife-edge frontier
Of Timelessness, knowing that yonder
Ahead was the life I might live
Could I but move
Into the terror of unmarred whiteness under
The be-nimed and frozen sun.
While behind, I knew,
In the garrote of perfect knowledge, that
The past flowed backward: trees bare
As though of all deed unleafed, and
Dead leaves lost are only
Old words forgotten in snowdrifts.
But the crow in distance called, and I knew
He spoke truth, for
Higher a wash of pale pink suddenly tinted the mowing,
And from spruce-blackness magenta
Leaped closer. But at
52
That instant, sun-nimb
Made contact with jag-heave of mountain.
Magenta lapped suddenly gray at my feet,
With pink, farther up,
Going gray.
Hillward and sky-thrust, behind me,
Leafless and distanced to eastward, a huge
Beech clung to its last lone twinge
Of pink on the elephant-gray—far under
One star.
Now the track, gone pale in tree-night,
Downward floated before me, to darkness.
So starward I stared
To the unnamed void where Space and God
Flinch to come, and where
Un-Time roars like a wind that only
The dead, unweeping, hear.
Oh, Pascal!
What does a man need to forget?
But moved on, however, remembering
That somewhere—somewhere, it seemed—
Beautiful faces above a hearthstone bent
Their inward to an outward glow.
53
Remembering, too, that when a door upon dark
Opens, and I, fur-prickled with frost,
Against the dark stand, one gaze
Will life and smile with sudden sheen
Of a source far other than firelight—or even
Imagined star-glint.
54