Projections and Reflections in Audubon: A Vision

In Part V [B] of Robert Penn Warren's poetic sequence, Audubon: A Vision, a great tree lies on a mud bank in the Mississippi River. Its root system is lifted and exposed. Its essential wood has been bleached white as bone. Somewhere upstream it once stood tall and full, cloaked in the greenery of life. Now those leaves, the twigs, the bark, the inessential boughs, have been stripped away by weather and the flow of the river. In the water nearby a star—perhaps Arcturus—is reflected. There is no wind save the sweep of our imagination. The river murmurs in its channel, suggesting time, or duration, as it flows past. The tree is perfectly still, looming against the darkness, for it is now outside the dimension of time. The tree is the Tree of Life, in this instance the life of Audubon, which Warren, in his poetic vision, has reduced to its essential structure.

In order to assess the metaphoric significance of this tree we might examine another passage in the poem that addresses the subject of pattern or structure in different terms:

The dregs
Of all nightmare are the same, and we call it
Life. He knows that much, being a man,
And knows that the dregs of all life are nightmare.
Unless.
Unless what? (131)

Such questions are an essential aspect of Warren's art (Warren's working title for the poem was "Audubon and a Question for You"): through them he commands us to participate in the poem, to offer an answer—not facilely, as we might be tempted, but in consideration of the complex moral labyrinth into which he has led us.

The answer to "Unless what?" is implicit in Audubon: A Vision, but a more explicit answer is found in a poem written several years later. In "Old Nigger on One-Mule Cart Encountered Late at Night When Driving Home from Party in Back Country" Warren recounts how difficult shaping (or discovering shape in) the autobiographical materials had been for him. It took years before a sudden insight allowed him to do so:

In the lyrical logic and nightmare astuteness that
Is God's name, by what magnet, I demand,
Are the iron and out-flung filings of our lives, on
A sheet of paper, blind-blank as Time, snapped
Into a polarized pattern. . . . (187)

Here "God" seems equated with the Unconscious mind, with the powerful reservoir of patterns or archetypes which inform our understanding of life that is otherwise nothing more than unrelated events—"out-flung filings" or "dregs." Here psychology is elevated to the realm of metaphysics and theology.

This emphasis on the importance of the unconscious is evident even in Warren's earliest poetry. Warren had just turned twenty when "To a Face in the Crowd" was published in The Fugitive in June 1925, but it remained important to Warren throughout his career: he included it as the last poem of each of the Selected Poems volumes (1935, 1943, 1966, 1975, 1985). Although manuscript materials at the Beinecke indicate that Warren originally intended to remove the poem from the 1985 volume, later he decided to retain it—evidence that he still valued the poem, probably because it introduced themes that remained central throughout his life's work. The poem is flawed and suffers from the undigested influence of Allen Tate and T. S. Eliot, but it establishes an important theme in its emphasis on the centrality of our specific past:

A certain night has borne both you and me;
We are children of an ancient band.

...

Renounce the night as I, and we must meet
As weary nomads in this desert at last,
Borne in the lost procession of these feet. (26)

Already Warren has perceived a remedy for solipsism, which, in their early poems, Eliot and Tate could only diagnose. Essentially he says: Only if we recognize that we have this dark past in common can...