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Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more
complicated
Of dead and living.—T. S. Eliot, “East Coker”
…every ticket's round-trip…
—Warren, “Walk by Moonlight in Small Town”
MY subject is Robert Penn Warren, particularly the love and anguish that typify his work whenever he turned to the question of his parents, Anna Ruth Penn and Robert Franklin Warren; but I will begin with a look at a once popular, now forgotten poem by a sentimental lyricist of the second half of the nineteenth century: Elizabeth Akers Allen (1882–1911). However sincere, her “Rock Me to Sleep” exemplifies the kind of “pure poetry” Warren and his fellow New Critics distrusted, dealing as it does with a “soft subject” without discernible irony. Mrs. Allen lost her mother in childhood, and the speaker in her poem, a mature woman who has clearly lived an emotionally exhausting life and now craves sleep and peace, longs to return to that Edenic time when her mother comforted her and set all things right:
Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,
Make me a child again just for to-night!
Mother, come back from the echoless shore,
Take me again to your heart as of yore.
Readers of Warren's “The Return: An Elegy,” the first of the Thirty-Six Poems (1935), have heard these lines before, but with an “impure” twist:
© 2002 by William Bedford Clark
385
turn backward turn backward O time in your flight
and make me a child again just for tonight
good lord he's wet the bed come bring a light
It is possible, of course, to set aside autobiographical concerns for a moment and admire on a purely technical level the mordant intertextuality Warren brings to bear on the Victorians' saccharine cult of motherhood. While the voice in Mrs. Allen's poem is univocal in its yearning for maternal care, Warren gives us a speaker who reveals just how often grief and relief are intertwined. Despite himself Warren's persona exults in his new independence (“the old bitch is dead”), only to convict himself of a shameful breach of social and filial decorum (“what have I said!”). Given the demands of conventional piety on the one hand and barely...