624
PARTISAN REVIEW
but then his mother takes up the "sweet-smelling squaw fruit/All
golden and pink," and in fondling the baby becomes again girlish
and ecstatic. Suddenly the boy half realizes the maternal affection he
deeply desires cou ld easily be transferred to another. The poem is
rife with both nineteenth-century and psychological themes: the
abandoned orphan, the "secret" mothe r, the vicarious sibling, the
loss of innocence, oedipal pleasure and guilt.
It
is an altogether
remarkabl e poem , built on an incident Warren mustn ' t overendow
with significance, yet at the same time he will need great cunning to
show how ineffable it is : "The scene is too vivid, so tears , not words,
I find .fIr perhaps I forget, it might catch me by surprise." The poem
ends with the theme of
tempus jugit,
but this is a screen-memory for
some greater, more disturbi ng truth about the self and its est imation
of its own worth. The poem could easily explain a whole lifetime of
guilt and conflict; it could explain all of Warren's "shadowy autobi–
ography," as its title suggests. The mother contents hersel f with one
swing of the baby, one shriek of joy" at the giddy swoop and swirl. "
And the poem concludes:
Yes, that was all, except for the formal farewell ,
And wordless we wandered the snow-dabbled st reet, and day,
With her hands both clutching my arm till I thought it would swell ,
Then home, fumblin g key, she said: "Shu cks' Time gets away."
We entered. She laid out my supper. My train left a t eight
To go back to the world where all is always the same.
Success or failure-what can allev iate
The pa ng of unworthiness built into Time's own name)
For Warren, the major subject is memory, for it preserves and
redeems , and this is the only thing we can set against the immensi–
ties that would otherwise belittle all our efforts. As he says, " how
short that time for the great globe/To remember so much! " And
often the voice in this book is less one of redeeming memory than it
is that of lonely reassurance-like the gesture in the last poem of the
book: " Alone,!I wish you well in your night/As I pass you in my
own." Self-revelation has its darknesses as well as its lights to serve
as guideposts.
CHARLES MOLESWORTH
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