Penn Warren, the tragic realist:

'We hear the crashless fall of stalks of Time"'

In our further consideration of Robert Penn Warren's poetry, let's look at an even earlier poem than 'Billie Potts'. It is called 'Bearded Oaks' and we find it to be very much in the mode of Donne's 'Exstasie'. Even the situation is similar. Here is the first quatrain of the latter: "Where, like a pillow on a bed, A Pregnant banke swelled up, to rest The violets reclining head, Sat we two, one anothers best;" And here is the second quatrain of the former: So, waiting, we in the grass now lie Beneath the languorous tread of light: The grasses, kelp-like satisfy The nameless motions of the air."

In Donne's poem two lovers are seeking a spiritual union as real as the physical union they have enjoyed, but find that everything comes back to the physical, the only reality of which they are sure. Herein lies the poignancy of the metaphysical exploration. In Warren's poem, the lovers are seeking an eternal union beyond the passion of love. As daytime deepens into darkness in the oak grove, their own history and that of the world passes before them. Yet all the doings of the day, constructive and destructive, must end in the nothingness of night and belong to the past.

Robert Penn Warren

"All our history is voiceless here, As all our rage, the rage of stone; If hope is hopeless, then fearless fear, And history is thus undone.' The poem ends with an insistence on the enduring value of love in the face of oncoming age and extinction: "I do not love you less that now The caged heart makes iron stroke, Or less that all that light once gave The graduate dark should now revoke. We live in time, so little time And we learn all so painfully, That we may spare this hour's term To practice for eternity." The poignancy here surpasses that of Donne, but like Donne's is heightened by the discipline that conventional metre and rhyme combined with a ratiocinative manner administer.

Original guilt

We have already considered 'The Leaf' from Warren's middle period. Although he employs free verse here form is still present. But now the rhythms are determined by feeling rather than metre and the rhyming is of thoughts rather than words. This is achieved through the skilful handling of diction and syntax. The obsession with original guilt seen in 'Billie Potts' and the yearning for permanence present in 'Bearded Oaks' are combined in this poem.

As we enter Warren's later period we come to one of his most famous poems, 'Evening Hawk.' It is here that the metaphor of the hawk, recurrent in his poetry, is most powerfully employed. The opening verse has a dramatic beauty quite unlike but comparable to that of Hopkins' 'Windhover': '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.' No longer is this the 'hawk shudder' of 'The Leaf.' Now the hawk, since it is not conscious of mortality, is beyond Time, and therefore represents Time's terrifying finality: 'His wing Scythes down another day, his motion Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear The crashless fall of stalks of Time.'

Descriptive lines

But since the hawk is innocent of human guilt he also represents something more terrifying, namely the morality of nature that mercilessly demands the price of human error.

'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.' This is the darkness, both natural and judicial, that the evening hawk brings upon the unforgivable world of mankind.In 'Mortal Limit', a poem of an even later period, we find Warren returning to conventional form by way of a sonnet with end-rhyming.

This serves to give definition and cohesion to his long, prose-like but naturalistically descriptive lines.

Compound words

He is still preoccupied with the hawk. Watching it rise ever upwards in the sunset to the level of distant mountain peaks and into the last reaches of the dying light, he wonders: 'Beyond what height Hangs now the black speck? Beyond what range will gold eyes see New ranges rise to mark a last scrawl of light?" On the other hand, since the hawk no longer seems to strives to hold its position in the sky, as in 'Leaf', the poet wonders further:

'Or, having tasted the atmosphere's thinness, does it Hang motionless in dying vision before It knows it will accept the mortal limit, And swing into the great circular downwardness that will restore The breath of earth?' Is there an acceptance now that the dizzying heights of both aquiline and human flight are unsustainingly 'thin'? that they must eventually be forsaken in a final downward spiral to the element 'Of rock? Of rot? Of other such Items, and the darkness of whatever dream we clutch?' Hawk and man are finally one in the realisation of their common mortality and the fact that their common dream of escaping their earth-bound state must end in the darkness of earthly extinction.

'Myth of Mountain Sunrise' is contemporaneous with 'Mortal Limit.' Here too the lines are lengthy and rhyming, but the diction is denser and the syntax more elliptical.

The profusion of compound words and the many-layered building up of images from the natural world are reminiscent of Hopkins. In particular are we reminded of the latter's 'Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves' where evening is reluctantly giving way to night, viz: "Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, vaulty, voluminous...stupendous Evening strains to be time's vast, womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night." In Warren's poem the tension is between night and day as evident at sunrise. "Prodigious, prodigal, crags steel-ringing To dream-hoofs nightlong, proverbial Words stone-incised in language unknowable, but somehow singing Their wisdom-song against disaster of granite and all Moonless non-redemption on the left hand of dawn: The mountain dimly wakes, stretches itself on windlessness. Feels its deep chasm waking, yawn."

The eternal-seeming mountain, that seems to have been alive during the night, strives to impart its subterranean wisdom to the day. The leaf and the maiden-like tree, now revealed by the light, acknowledge an affinity with the rock. Yet, as the day sets in and they begin to dominate the landscape, this connection is forgotten in the pride of superterranean life. "Leaf cries: 'I feel my deepest filament in dark rejoice. I know that the density of basalt has a voice.

How soon will the spiderweb, dew-dappled gleam In Pompeian glory!....The sun blazes over the peak. That will be the old tale told."

Minimal commentary

It is the old story of day seeming to triumph over night, human knowledge seeking but failing to learn from nature and seeming to rise above it in the blaze of temporal daytime achievement. Yet this is an illusion, human glory is as frail as a spiderweb, as transient as Pompey.

What is remarkable in this poem is how Warren, like Hopkins in 'Sybil's Leaves', achieves such dramatic intensity and profundity of thought without a human presence and with minimal commentary. Through his Hopkins-like ability to capture the inscape of the natural scene he is able to endow it with powerful symbolic significance.

This is why, despite the profusion of natural imagery in Warren's poetry, it would be as much a mistake to describe him as a naturalistic poet as it was for Eliot to describe Hopkins as a nature poet.

Both poets employ nature instinctively and imaginatively as the medium through which they express their deepest yearnings; Hopkins to praise the Creator through the creation and Warren to seek meaning beyond the vice-like grip of guilt and mortality in which mankind is caught. MI Kuruvilla would undoubtedly have described him as a tragic realist, a favourite phrase of his but one that he reserved for his favourite poets and novelists. And Warren is clearly a poet in the great tradition of metaphorical richness and concreteness of language that Leavis traced from Shakespeare through Donne, Keats and Hopkins to the later Yeats and Eliot.