In the following essay, Dietrich interprets "Blackberry Winter" in terms of its religious context, casting the tramp as an antichrist who negates Christian belief in the face of the disillusionment of life.

For four and half decades readers, professors, and critics seem to have stumbled, at least the first time through, over the last line of Robert Penn Warren's short story, "Blackberry Winter." If we know the basic story line, the adult narrator's final, backward-looking observation, "But I did follow him, all the years," is plain enough on the surface. It simply refers to the tramp of the story and to an experience the narrator is remembering in the context of 35 interim years. But as readers, we know there is a deeper level, and it is the deeper level that throws us. Seth, the narrator, has not literally spent the years since he was nine years old...