Audubon by Robert Penn Warren

First published: 1969; collected in Selected Poems, 1923-1975, 1976

Type of poem: Poetic sequence

The Poem

Robert Penn Warren once said that he had started Audubon: A Vision, about the American naturalist and painter of native birds John James Audubon, in 1946-1947, when he was reading Audubon’s and other subhistories of early nineteenth century America. He was dissatisfied with it then and threw away what he had written. Twenty years later he suddenly remembered one line of his poem and immediately knew what he must do with it. The line he remembered is the only remnant of the original poem: “Was not the lost dauphin,” which begins the first poem in this seven-part meditation on the mystery of identity.

This odd disclaimer derives from a legend which arose after Audubon’s death that he was the lost Dauphin of France, son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. He was, in fact, the son of a sea captain and his mistress. The obvious contrast between the fantasized origin and his humble beginnings provides the first irony in the question of his identity.

That the poem is called a vision suggests that the insight it provides is only partly derived from the known facts of Audubon’s life. The first stanza ends with the assertion that he (Audubon) was only himself “and his passion—what/ Is man but his passion?” This suggests that the poem will inquire into the nature of Audubon’s obsession with wild nature, which was the wellspring of his art.

The rest of this first poem imagines the painter’s rapt attention to color, form, and the effects of light: how the great white heron looks black against a blood-red sunset, how the overflowing juice of blueberries that drool from a bear’s yawn highlights the surprising whiteness of its teeth, and how the bee’s wings glint like mica in the sunlight.

The second poem, entitled “The Dream He Never Knew the End Of,” is a narrative about Audubon asking for shelter in an isolated forest cabin and then being rescued, at the last moment, from the old woman, his host, and her rascally sons who intended to murder him in his sleep. The three would-be killers are hanged in the morning—frontier justice as speedy and merciless as the crone’s impulse to murder for the gold watch he had shown her the night before. Although this story may have some factual basis, it is told for its archetypal mythic nature—the recurring nightmare of a person drawn to the wilderness, recognizing that brute nature, especially unfettered human nature, can be dangerous.

Yet even here, when the persona’s paralyzing terror evaporates, he sees something beautiful and dignified in the old woman. Though her sons snivel and beg, she remains calm and defiant, indifferent to fate. The persona, with spontaneous empathy, realizes that the gold watch was an emblem of a civilized, ordered world which had been denied her. With this understanding, he felt compassion, even love, rather than revulsion for his assailant.

The poems continue exploring Audubon’s emotional bond to the timeless world of the wilderness, sometimes in philosophical terms, sometimes lyrical, sometimes simply factual. Unlike the old woman in the forest, Audubon had clear alternatives available. He had a wife and apparently loved her—but usually from a distance, communing with “dear Lucy” by letter and playing his flute alone in the forest after sunset. He could have been a successful trader on the frontier; he could have slept in a bed at home—but did not. Neither comfort nor money could lure him. He declined Daniel Webster’s kindness when, Audubon himself wrote, he “would give me a fat place was I willing to/ have one; but I love indepenn and piece more/ than humbug and money [sic].”

Yet he did eventually succumb in some measure to fame and honor, even traveling to Europe, where he entertained his hosts by whistling bird calls of his distant forest. He wrote that he continually dreamt of birds. He even came back and lived at home with his wife, but clearly the wellsprings of his art were failing—“the mouthpiece/ Of his flute was dry, and his brushes.”

Audubon died in bed, and the poet suggests that with him faded the timeless wilderness world of America: “For everything there is a season.” Yet the last poem of the sequence, in which the poet speaks as his own persona, remembering his own fascination with nature from childhood, suggests that the dream of the timeless world never dies. It continues to inspire the artist, whether painter or poet, and offers a secret well of joy for those who both know and love the world. Warren’s special affinity for Audubon’s passion is understandable, since he himself aspired to be a painter of wildlife when he was a child.

Forms and Devices

The diction and the metaphors in this free-verse poem maintain a certain tension that prevents it from lapsing into either the purely sentimental or the purely Gothic treatment of nature. Although sometimes lyrical, as befits Audubon’s passion for the wilderness, metaphors are sometimes startling, even unpleasant. The color of the dawn against which the great heron rises is “redder than meat.” Later in the same stanza, it is the “color of God’s blood spilt.” The heron rises slowly as though “pulled by a string.” The first of these curious metaphors may suggest a conventional attitude toward nature as savage, “red in tooth and claw.” The second seems to introduce a religious element, perhaps redemption (or at least the need for it), while the third gives a peculiarly mechanical impression, as though all were part of some kind of elaborate stage setting.

Audubon, however, with the sensitivity of the painter, both marvels at the stage setting and mentally “corrects” the reality of the creatures he observes. Although the bird looks black against the red sky, Audubon names the genus and species and knows exactly the heron’s true color. The undertone of potential savagery is caught again in the brilliance of a yawning bear’s teeth, even though this particular bear is only eating berries and about to hibernate peacefully for the winter.

In the nightmare sequence, the images and metaphors suggest not the relatively innocent potential for violence in nature but a truly ominous quality, the degeneration possible in humans who know neither the natural curbs of instinct nor the social deterrence of law. Even the smoke rising, or rather sinking, from the chimney is described in disgusting terms: It “ravels,/ White, thin, down the shakes, like sputum.” The words describing the old woman who opens the door are suspiciously like a child’s version of a wicked witch: She is “strong-beaked, the haired mole/ Near the nose.” One side of her face is in deep shadow, the other glows in the firelight. Later the woman spits on a knife as she sharpens it on a stone, and the reader remembers the slimey smoke like sputum.

The action becomes more surreal as it blends with remembered childhood nightmares. Although the uneasy visitor lying by the fire keeps his rifle loaded and cocked beside him, he becomes immobilized by a strange lassitude, as though helpless to defend himself. His rescue when three strong men burst in the door seems equally unreal, since no clue is given as to who they are or why they came.

Nevertheless, the later part of that section is surprisingly rational, relentlessly realistic in some details, as though to clear away all illusions. “The affair was not tidy,” and later, “The affair was not quick: both sons long jerking and farting.” The old woman, however, is “without motion, frozen/ In a rage of will, an ecstasy of iron, as though/ This was the dream that, lifelong, she had dreamed toward.” In this usage, “dream” is almost synonymous with “fate,” which casts another light upon the ambiguity of experience and choice.

After this dark night of the soul, the diction and metaphors are lighter, more informed with joy. The persona becomes more human and more comfortable with his life decisions. The section filled with quotes from Audubon’s diaries or letters provides intimate glimpses of a varied personality. Sometimes he affirms the attitudes of the romantic naturalist, with his devotion to the noble savage view of the Native American: “He saw the Indian, and felt the splendor of God.” Audubon wrote that he saw “the Man Naked from his/ hand and yet free from acquired Sorrow.” In other words, the wilderness had the innocence of the world before the Fall of Man.

Other vignettes show Audubon as being as vulnerable to wounded pride as anyone, as when a pretty girl passed him by without so much as a nod, not remembering “how beautiful/ I had rendered her face once by Painting it/ at her Request with Pastelles [sic].”

The poem makes effective use of symbols. The most important of these is the gold watch that fascinates the old woman of the forest. It is the quintessential emblem of the man-made ordered world that humankind has superimposed upon nature, which knows only the ordering of the seasons and the pulses of instinct. The action of the heron, which seemed mechanical in its motion across the sky—but was not—is countered close to the end of the poem by a symbolic image of the truly mechanical contrivance. “The Northwest Orient plane, New York to Seattle, has passed, winking westward.” This is one of the triumphs of the modern clock-oriented time—to keep the world on schedule; there is no more wandering around at will in a trackless wilderness.

Bibliography

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Burt, John. Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988.

Clark, William Bedford, ed. Critical Essays on Robert Penn Warren. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981.

Grimshaw, James A. Understanding Robert Penn Warren. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.

Justus, James H. The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.

Madden, David, ed. The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

Ruppersburg, Hugh. Robert Penn Warren and the American Imagination. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.

Szczesiul, Anthony. Racial Politics and Robert Penn Warren’s Poetry. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.

Watkins, Floyd C., John T. Hiers, and Mary Louise Weaks, eds. Talking with Robert Penn Warren. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.