SOURCE: Ford, Thomas W. “Indian Summer and Blackberry Winter: Emily Dickinson and Robert Penn Warren.” Southern Review 17, no. 3 (July 1981): 542-50.

In the following essay, Ford discusses the common themes shared by Warren's “Blackberry Winter” and the poem “These are the days when Birds come back” by Emily Dickinson.

Separated as they were by both space and time, Robert Penn Warren and Emily Dickinson responded in remarkably similar fashion to those two curious seasonal freaks of nature—Indian summer and blackberry winter. Dickinson's poem “These are the days when Birds come back,” written about 1859, and Warren's short story “Blackberry Winter,” written in the fall or winter of 1945-46, are two sides of the same coin. Indian summer, that short-lived period in late October or early November when the weather suddenly seems to turn around and slip back into summer, is the central image in Dickinson's poem. Blackberry winter, that...