Robert Penn Warren, as a writer viewed the world through two lenses: one was the lens of the perceptive — the wanderer in time who encounters phenomena and tends to make conclusions about their significance.   The other was the lens of the stationary — the constant.   Thus, RPW tended to gravitate towards hisorical narrative as a means of developing his characters.  The following two poems exemplify RPW’s lens of the world:

Truth

Truth is what you cannot tell.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Truth is for the grave                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Truth is only the flowing shadow cast                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           By the wind-tossed elm                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               When sun is bright and grass well groomed.

Truth is the downy feather                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           You blow from your lips to shine in sunlight

Truth is the trick that history,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Over and over again, plays on us.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Its shape is unclear in shadow or brightness,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             And its utterance the whisper we strive to catch,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Or the scream of a locomotive desperately                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Blowing for the tragic crossing. Truth                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Is the curse laid upon us in the garden.

Truth is the serpent’s joke,

And is the sun-stung dust-devil that swirls                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                On the lee side of God when he drowses.

Truth is the long soliloquy                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Of the dead all their long night.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Truth is what would be told by the dead                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  If they could hold a conversation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 With the living and thus fulfill obligation to us.

Their accumulated wisdom must be immense.

The serpent’s joke that man can know truth.  In the end we just tell narratives — stories of our perceptions.  And perhaps the Dead might correct us if they could — oh how wise they would be.   How history taunts us, tempting us that we might be immortal, or at least our presence immortal.

Timeless, Twinned

Angelic, lonely, autochthuonous, one white                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Cloud lolls, unmoving, on an azure which                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Is called the sky, and in gold drench of light,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             No leaf , However gold, may stir, nor a single blade twitch,

Though autumn-honed, of the cattail by the pond.  No voice                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Speaks, since here no voice knows                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               The language in which a tongue might now rejoice.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  So silence, a transparent flood, thus overflows.

In it, I drown, and from my depth my gaze                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Yearns, faithful, toward that cloud’s integrity,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           As though I’ve now forgotten all other nights and days,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Anxiety born of the future’s snare, or the nag of history.

What if, to my back, thin-shirted, brown grasses yet bring                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  The heat of the summer, or beyond the perimeter northward, wind,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Snow-bellied lurks? I stare at the cloud, white, motionless.  I cling.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    To our single existence, timeless twinned.

Poems by Robert Penn Warren, published in The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren (Ed. John Burt).