In the following essay, Watkins suggests that the puzzling ending to "Blackberry Winter" (that the boy followed the tramp) is incomplete and lacks clues from the story necessary for an adequate understanding of how the boy did follow the tramp.

Robert Penn Warren wrote his short stories in the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. He did not publish any poems from his Selected Poems (1943) until Brother to Dragons (1953) and then the poems collected into the Pulitzer Prize winning Promises (1957). Brevity and compactness (and perhaps the intensity of writing short fiction) interfered with Warren's composition of poetry. On the other hand, he has said that the emotional turbulence of the last stages of his marriage to Cinina Brescia also ran counter to the mood which produces poetry.

Preciseness of imagery, distinctness of characterization, and revelation of meaning give Warren's "Blackberry Winter" many traits of...