When I first read “Globe of Gneiss” my reaction was that I liked it but didn’t agree with it. I came to it with a strong positive attitude toward Penn Warren because of his book Democracy and Poetry. He is a thoughtful man, one who both writes and thinks well. There were a number of things I disagreed with in Democracy and Poetry but I liked it because its overall compassionate tone and lucid presentation. I require that in writing if I am going to put much stock in what the author is trying to tell me about what it means to be human.

I found Penn Warren’s poetry has just such a combination. Still, figuring out what a poem means requires (for me) a great deal of effort. My experience of it, my delight in the tension of his line breaks, and the wonderful phrase “night wind nightlong,” reaches into my own experience of the alternate jerkiness and grace of time passing but Penn Warren is very different from me so my experience alone cannot tell me what the poem “means” because meaning is a shared event.

With poetry (at least I think so), meaning comes from either sharing it directly with other readers, talking about it, or watching others react to its reading, for example; meaning can come from trying to understand the author, who is simultaneously another reader and the mind which used those words, those cadences, those spaces to express something of his experience – that moment of being human; and meaning comes from treating poems as one would do a person and “reading” one poem against another, just as one asks all ones’ friends what honour means when trying to make an honourable (but potentially dangerous) decision.

Still, reading a poem, as in any experience, starts with that which has become personal knowledge. For me on reading “Globe of Gneiss,” those things were time, memory and perception. Of course, these are quite like my own preoccupations, so that probably explains why I liked it so much in the first place. Like anyone else, I like reading about what interests me already. And of course that rings a little warning bell – is that what the poem is really about? Did I just see it there because that is what interests me? And so I am off and running – trying to understand what the poem means.

My first step was to begin rereading Democracy and Poetry. It seemed to me that the poem was talking in part about the experience of time for two kinds of beings, one human, with a short life span and a rock, with an enormous grip on time. Probably more importantly, the poem is about the consequences of that perception on behaviour and feeling. The rock because of its experiences of “unspeakable pressure” has become “harder than steel” and yet is able to stay “poised…in balanced perfection.” The man, in contrast to this, shifts attitude in the space of the poem from a callow kind of young man who tries to destroy the rock’s balance through main force and the kind of man who visits the rock to watch lichen creep “like Time” up the its face. The transition seems to me to show that the man learns from the rock’s vaster perception and as a consequence begins to question his own grasp on history and its human face, memory. In other words, he begins to suffer his own “unspeakable pressure,” the one that comes from dawning self awareness and the awareness of the existence of others.

This sense that others (even if they are rocks) actually exist is what Penn Warren means when he talks about community as opposed to society in Democracy and Poetry. Society for him is something akin to an ordered group of people. Community really talks about the relationships that link the people together. Another key concept in the book is that of the self.

It seems to me that this definition must be understood to grasp what the poem is saying.

I’ll keep going for ages yet, but I won’t bore you with it. But there it is, my process.