SOURCE: West, Paul. In Robert Penn Warren, pp. 34-8. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964.

In the following excerpt, West highlights motifs of nature and the concept of home in “Blackberry Winter.”

A single volume, The Circus in the Attic (1948), contains all of Warren's short stories, of which “Blackberry Winter,” published separately in 1946, is outstanding in the history of the genre as well as the most compact epitome of Warren's output. A man in his early forties recalls his initiation into manhood and the ways of nature. When a city-clad stranger comes to work on the farm during a time of storm and flood (like December 1811 in Brother to Dragons) the boy, little apprehending the devastation and stoicism evident everywhere, fastens to him and thus vicariously “goes away.” This symbolic infidelity the adult narrator has come to regret; like the speaker in several of Warren's early poems he is...