Memory and Guilt in 11 Poems on the Same Theme

Feeling it necessary to really familiarize myself with Warren’s early work, I re-read Eleven Poems on the Same Theme, Thirty Six Poems, and the anthology which includes a few extra poems from this period over again.

I’ve already stated my objection to the vast majority of Thirty Six Poems. That is, Warren grounds his later work, the work with which I am most familiar, in experience. He epitomizes the phrase “show, don’t tell.” Here, however, he channels much of his energy into long poems moralizing or philosophizing into nothingness. From the preachy paradigmatic lines comes a sense of Warren’s immaturity in writing. In fact, when he edited Brother to Dragons in 1979, he removed many of the long tangential passages.

Much more effective is “Pondy Woods” where Warren shows Big Jim Todd’s struggle against inevitable death. The vultures, the mouthpiece of death, replace Warren’s familiar hawk in flying off into the sunset. Here Warren mocks Horace’s confident assertion, “Non omnis moriar” a Latin phrase meaning “not all of me dies.” The croaking vulture who says it, called “pedantic” by Warren, provides only cold instruction to Big Jim Todd. What good that he will live on afterwards? He will still be dead. It’s interesting that it seems almost more terrifying not that death is inevitable, but that some essential part lives on. The feeling arises again in Crime, a poem from Eleven Poems about a killer who cannot remember what crime has left him lying in a ditch cold and alone. Warren suggests that the impact of guilt—the human memory’s tendency to torture the mind with guilt—outweighs any punitive measures the justice system may take. Again in Original Sin: A Short Story, Warren treats remembrance as punishment as the embodiment of the speaker’s past regret returns again and again to haunt him, so much so that he rejoices at hearing of the death of old friends who might remember his transgressions.

Though a comfort to most, the opportunity to live after death frightens Warren. Guilt in all its many forms, the recurring motif of 11 Poems, weighs so heavily that death seems as a release. The fact that the killer forgot what he did freed him from the burden of re-living his crime. Life, then, always recognized as a trial, becomes a sort of punishment, restitution for bearing the yoke of humanity. I’ll have to look to see if the same feeling appears in his later work, if memory is still the punishment for being human.

I’m also feeling that this concept of memory might contribute very much to his sense of history as well. What is history but the collective memory of a civilization, a nation, or a family? With Warren, the “storehouse of our alibis” is not a static thing of the past, but a vital part of daily life. Linking memory and history has many implications, not the least of which is that humanity must learn to live with its past. I hope to discuss this further in my next post where I’m going to consider the role of history in Warren’s early poetry.