Category: Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren’s “Tale of Time: Poems 1960-1966” continues his exploration of the dark side of human life, this time with a particular focus on death. The title poem is a sequence of VII poems, with several sub-poems that focuses on his mother’s death. Although not all the poems focus on death, many of the best ones do. At my age, having lost both parents, the poems do seem quite moving and bring back old, and not so old, memories.

My favorite poem in this section doesn’t deal directly with death, though the mood of the poem certainly fits this theme:

Dragon-Tree

The faucet drips all night, the plumber forgot it.
A cat, in coitu, squalls like Hell’s honeymoon.
A child is sick. The doctor coughs.
Do you feel, in your heart, that life has turned out as once you expected?

Spring comes early, ice
Groans in the gorge. Water, black, swirls
Into foam like lace white in fury. The gorge boulders boom.
When you hear, in darkness, the gorge boulders boom, does your heart say, “No comment”?

Geese pass in dawn-light, and the news
From Asia is bad, and the Belgians sure mucked up
The Congo. Human flesh is yet eaten there, often uncooked.
Have you sat on a hillside at sunset and eaten the flesh of your own
heart?

The world drives at you like a locomotive
In an archaic movie. It whirls off the screen,
It is on you, the iron. You hear, in that silence, your heart.
Have you thought that the headlines are only the image of your own heart?

Some study compassion. Some, confusing
Personal pathology with the logic of history, jump
Out of windows. Some walk with God, some by rivers, at twilight.
Have you tried to just sit with the children and tell a tale ending in laughter?

Oh, tell the tale, and laugh, and let
God laugh-for your heart is the dragon-tree, the root
Feels, in earth-dark, the abrasive scale, the coils
Twitch. But look! the new leaf flaps gilt in the sunlight. Birds sing.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve certainly had the feeling described in the first stanza more times than I care to remember. It would be hard to imagine going through life without feeling that your life is not turning out the way you thought it would or wanted it to. Does it ever turn out the way you “wanted it to?”

I’ve experienced the feelings described in the second stanza even more than those described in the first stanza. One of the greatest weaknesses of being an introvert is that far too often you tend to observe life rather than live it. I’ve certainly never been known for showing affection; even as a child I would hide in the closet when I cried.

The scenes in the third stanza could have been ripped directly from today’s paper. Despite our heroic defeat of the “evil empire,” there certainly seems to be as much evil and as much consequent sorrow in the world as there has always been, doesn’t there? Too often world events do seem to come at me “like a locomotive/In an archaic movie.” When I’m not just throwing my hands up in despair, I am amazed how much anger and hatred these stories can evoke from me. How can people do these things to other people, and how can we stand by and let it happen?

While current events have never driven me to contemplate jumping out of a window, it has certainly evoked as much compassion as anger from me. But, increasingly I’ve enjoyed sitting and reading a book to Gavin or watching Peter Pan and laughing uproariously at poor old Captain Hook as he tries to keep from being devoured by the gigantic croc. Doing the same thing with my kids when they were young apparently didn’t change the universe, but it did make it possible for me to enjoy life in ways that would never have been possible otherwise. Hope springs eternal with each child.

Apparently concerned “Promises” may have given too optimistic view of human nature, Warren returned to old themes in “You, Emperors, and Others.” In fact, the section begins with a series of poems entitled “Garland for You,” you being, apparently, we, we the readers, and, thus, the series is an exploration of human nature. It’s not a pretty view.

I liked this opening sequence better than anything in this section, but my favorite poems are those that open and close the series, “Clearly About You,” and “The Self that Stares.” The simple fact that the poem begins with the epitaph from an unknown Roman citizen suggests that Warren is attempting to diagnose human nature itself:

I. Clearly about You

-On tomb of Roman citizen of no historical importance, under the Empire

Benefac, hoc tecumferes.

Whoever you are, this poem is clearly about you,
For there’s nothing else in the world it could be about.
Whatever it says, this poem is clearly true,
For truth is all we are born to, and the truth’s out.

You won’t look in the mirror? Well-but your face is there
Like a face drowned deep under water, mouth askew,
And tongue in that mouth tastes cold water, not sweet air,
And if it could scream in that medium, the scream would be you.

Your mother preferred the more baroque positions.
Your father’s legerdemain marks the vestry accounts.
So you didn’t know? Well, it’s time you did-though one shuns
To acknowledge the root from which one’s own virtue mounts.

In the age of denture and reduced alcoholic intake,
When the crow’s dawn-calling stirs memory you’d better eschew,
You will try the cross, or the couch, for balm for the heart’s ache-
But that stranger who’s staring so strangely, he knows you are you.

Things are getting somewhat out of hand now-light fails on the marshes.
In the back lot the soft-faced delinquents are whistling like snipe.
The apples you stored in the cellar are acerb and harsh as
The heart that on bough of the bosom all night will not ripe.

Burn this poem, though it wring its small hands and cry alack.
But no use, for in bed, into your pajama pocket,
It will creep, and sleep as snug as a field mouse in haystack,
And its heart to your heart all night make a feather-soft racket.

I suspect the opening stanza grabbed me before I had a chance to truly realize what the theme of the poem was because, for me, at least, the best poetry is always clearly about “me,” not just because I’m self-centered, though I probably am, but because the best poetry is about human nature itself and because I’d like to believe that poetry, and art in general, does a better job of revealing truth, whatever that may be, then anything else.

By the second stanza, I’d begun to have some doubts whether Warren’s vision of truth and of “me” really coincided with my view. Still, I have little doubt that there are certain “truths” about myself that I really don’t want to see. It’s not too difficult to imagine, considering the current state of world affairs, that our forefathers may, like ourselves, have had some questionable motives for what they did.

By the last stanza Warren is right on, because I do want to deny that this is what I’m like, but he’s equally right that at moments, in my worst nightmares, I do fear my own motives.

The sequence ends with an equally chilling vision of human nature, rounding out the vision shared in the first poem:

VIII. The Self That Stares

John Henry said to the Captain, “A man ain’t nothing but a man.”
A folk ballad

Have you seen that brute trapped in your eye
When he realizes that he, too, will die?
Stare into the mirror, stare
At his dawning awareness there.
If man, put razor down, and stare.
If woman, stop lipstick in mid-air.
Yes, pity makes that gleam you gaze through-
Or is that brute now pitying you?
Time unwinds like a falling spool.
We have learned little in that school.

No, nothing, nothing, is ever learned
Till school is out and the books are burned,
And then the lesson will be so sweet
All you will long for will be to repeat
All the sad, exciting process
By which ignorance grew less
In all that error and gorgeous pain
That you may not live again.
What is that lesson? To recognize
The human self naked in your own eyes.

There is undeniably a part of us, a physical self, perhaps even a “brute,” though I’ll admit to being a little more accepting of the physical side of myself than Warren seems to be, that is terrified by death. And certainly when the thought of death arrives, it’s difficult not to feel at least a little “self-pity.” And at my age, time does seem to unwind “like a falling spool.”

Having taught 30 years, I can certainly believe that “nothing, nothing, is ever learned/ Till school is out and the books are burned,” though I’m not at all sure that Warren is really referring to “school” here, unless all of life can be seen as a form of “schooling.” Is it death itself that will make us long for all the “excting” mistakes in life that, despite the pain they caused, made us just a little smarter and gave life its meaning.?

In his introduction, Harold Bloom said, “At their strongest, Warren’s poems win their contest with the American Sublime and find a place with Melville’s best poems, formidable exiles from our dominant, Emersonian tradition.” While I’m not sure it’s a compliment for a poet’s poems to be compared to Melville’s poems, at his best, Warren does seem to offer the same kinds of insight into the frailties of human nature that Melville does.

Robert Penn Warren’s “Promises: Poems 1954-1956” finally contains some of the kinds of poems I was expecting when I asked for his collected poems for Christmas. After a hundred pages of slogging through poems that I found less than inspirational, I was delighted to find several poems in this forty page section that I liked a lot.

My favorite poem is probably “Gold Glade,” although the poem is far too optimistic to truly represent the rest of the poems in this section. Though I do find Warren’s vision of the world rather more optimistic in this section, poem number VI, entitled “School Lesson Based on Word of Tragic Death of Entire Gillum Family,” describes how a father killed his entire family with an ice pick while they were getting ready to go to school. So, it’s certainly not just a shift to optimism that makes these poems more appealing to me. Perhaps it is the introduction of a “personal” touch in the poems that I find most appealing. Somehow, unlike his earlier poems, you sense a real person behind these poems:

III. Gold Glade

Wandering, in autumn, the woods of boyhood,
Where cedar, black, thick, rode the ridge,
Heart aimless as rifle, boy-blankness of mood,
I came where ridge broke, and the great ledge,
Limestone, set the toe high as treetop by dark edge

Of a gorge, and water hid, grudging and grumbling,
And I saw, in mind’s eye, foam white on
Wet stone, stone wet-black, white water tumbling,
And so went down, and with some fright on
Slick boulders, crossed over. The gorge-depth drew night on,

But high over high rock and leaf-lacing, sky
Showed yet bright, and declivity wooed
My foot by the quietening stream, and so I
Went on, in quiet, through the beech wood:
There, in gold light, where the glade gave, it stood.

The glade was geometric, circular, gold,
No brush or weed breaking that bright gold of leaf-fall.
In the center it stood, absolute and bold
Beyond any heart-hurt, or eye’s grief-fall.
Gold-massy in air, it stood in gold light-fall,

No breathing of air, no leaf now gold-falling,
No tooth-stitch of squirrel, or any far fox bark,
No woodpecker coding, or late jay calling.
Silence: gray-shagged, the great shagbark
Gave forth gold light. There could be no dark.

But of course dark came, and I can’t recall
What county it was, for the life of me.
Montgomery, Todd, Christian-I know them all.
Was it even Kentucky or Tennessee?
Perhaps just an image that keeps haunting me.

No, no! in no mansion under earth,
Nor imagination’s domain of bright air,
But solid in soil that gave it its birth,
It stands, wherever it is, but somewhere.
I shall set my foot, and go there.

There is something magical in this poem, something that reminds me of my own childhood experiences in the woods, a magical experience that may only truly be possible in childhood but one we seek to repeat for the rest of our lives.

Of course, it is the kind of sentimental scene you’d expect to find in a movie like Lord of the Rings, but it’s also a realistic portrayal of a childhood moment that lingers in the memory, a moment that, as an adult, you can never be truly sure existed at all. Perhaps one must be truly innocent to perceive such a moment in its fullness.

As adults looking back, it’s hard to be truly sure that the moment did exist at all. Perhaps we only imagined the moment after reading it in romantic novels or seeing it portrayed in sentimental paintings. Still, there’s something to be said for the adult who refuses to believe the moment is entirely imaginary and seeks to regain that experience.

I’m beginning to realize why, besides the stress of moving, I’m having such a hard time getting into Robert Penn Warren’s early poems despite the fact I love his later poems.

Part of it is simply that I’m put off by his early style which seems to be a cross between Poe, Donne and Faulkner. The archaic, convoluted language at times seems pretentious and unnecessarily confusing. Too often the poems seem derivative and unoriginal.

Most of all, though, Penn Warren’s early themes simply don’t resonate with me. While my favorite poem in the section entitled “Eleven Poems on the Same Theme” uses simpler language than most of these early poems, it, too, focuses on the idea of sin and guilt:

Original Sin: A Short Story

Nodding, its great head rattling like a gourd,
And locks like seaweed strung on the stinking stone,
The nightmare stumbles past, and you have heard
It fumble your door before it whimpers and is gone:
It acts like the old hound that used to snuffle your door and moan.

You thought you had lost it when you left Omaha,
For it seemed connected then with your grandpa, who
Had a wen on his forehead and sat on the veranda
To finger the precious protuberance, as was his habit to do,
Which glinted in sun like rough garnet or the rich old brain bulging through.

But you met it in Harvard Yard as the historic steeple
Was confirming the midnight with its hideous racket,
And you wondered how it had come, for it stood so imbecile,
With empty hands, humble, and surely nothing in pocket:
Riding the rods, perhaps-or grandpa’s will paid the ticket.

You were almost kindly then, in your first homesickness,
As it tortured its stiff face to speak, but scarcely mewed;
Since then you have outlived all your homesickness,
But have met it in many another distempered latitude:
Oh, nothing is lost, ever lost! at last you understood.

But it never came in the quantum glare of sun
To shame you before your friends, and had nothing to do
With your public experience or private reformation:
But it thought no bed too narrow-it stood with lips askew
And shook its great head sadly like the abstract Jew.

Never met you in the lyric arsenical meadows
When children call and your heart goes stone in the bosom;
At the orchard anguish never, nor ovoid horror,
Which is furred like a peach or avid like the delicious plum.
It takes no part in your classic prudence or fondled axiom.

Not there when you exclaimed: “Hope is betrayed by
Disastrous glory of sea-capes, sun-torment of whitecaps
-There must be a new innocence for us to be stayed by.”
But there it stood, after all the timetables, all the maps,
In the crepuscular clatter of always, always, or perhaps.

You have moved often and rarely left an address,
And hear of the deaths of friends with a sly pleasure,
A sense of cleansing and hope, which blooms from distress;
But it has not died, it comes, its hand childish, unsure,
Clutching the bribe of chocolate or a toy you used to treasure.

It tries the lock; you hear, but simply drowse:
There is nothing remarkable in that sound at the door.
Later you may hear it wander the dark house
Like a mother who rises at night to seek a childhood picture;
Or it goes to the backyard and stands like an old horse cold in the pasture.

Probably what I like best about this poem in comparison to so many of the other poems is the semi-humorous treatment of the nightmare as established in the first stanza, with the nightmare being compared to an “old hound” snuffling at the narrator’s door. And rather than being totally repelled by the nightmare the author admits that “You were almost kindly then, in your first homesickness.” This is not the kind of nightmare that destroys people’s lives, but, instead, one that “hears of the death of friends with a sly pleasure.” Though it is “nothing remarkable,” this nightmare always seems there to remind us that we are all victims of “original sin.”

Perhaps the title of the poem itself suggests why I have so much of a problem identifying with these poems, for personally I’ve never believed in the concept of “Original Sin.” I still remember the outrage I felt when someone told me that a baby had to be baptized before it died or it could never attain heaven. That seemed like a totally ridiculous idea to me. No adult, even one just baptized, could ever be as innocent as a newborn babe. While novels like Lord of the Flies have made me question the validity of the concept oforiginal sin, in the end I have always rejected that concept for the idea that it is society, not human nature that is the real source of evil. Though people obviously inherit some personality traits, in the end it is their environment that determines how those traits are developed or corrupted.

Furthermore, though I can somewhat identify with reoccurring nightmares, the fact is that, despite my Vietnam experiences, I have never felt the kind of extended guilt that Warren describes in these earlier poems. It did take me several months to come to terms with Vietnam after I’d returned, and I spend many a night trying to understand what had happened and why I felt the way I did. In many ways it was a life-shattering experience. And though I still have been known to reflect on my Vietnam experiences with certain people after I’ve had a few too many beers, it is not with any great sense of guilt. It’s more, “God, I can’t imagine how I could have been that na”ve or that stupid.” Once I had time to examine what I had gone through, though, I was never again haunted by what I had done there.

I simply do not believe we inherit the sins of our forefathers, especially the sins of some mythical Adam and Eve. Perhaps if I’d been born to a wealthy family or had been born in the South the son of a son of an ex-slaveholder I would feel some of the narrator’s guilt, “for it seemed connected then with your grandpa.” Never having met a grandparent, and too poor to have inherited anything, though, it’s hard for me to identify with this kind of guilt.