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.
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I’ve read Robert Penn Warren’s Democracy and Poetry but until yesterday I had never read any of his poetry.  When I opened his book Being Here: Poetry 1977-1980 the first poem to come to my attention was “Globe of Gneiss.” I love rocks. So this became the first poem of his I read.

Here it is:

How heavy is it? fifteen tons? Thirty? More?–

The great globe of gneiss, poised, it would seem, by

A hair’s weight, there on the granite ledge. Stop!

Don’t go near! Or only on tiptoe. Don’t,

For God’s sake, be the fool I once was, who

Went up and pushed. Pushed with all strength,

Expecting the great globe to go

Hurtling like God’s wrath to crush

Spruces and pines down the cliff, at least

Three hundred yards down to the black lake the last

Glacier to live in Vermont had left to await

Its monstrous plunge.

I pushed. It was like trying

To push a mountain. It

Had lived through so much, the incessant

Shove, like a shoulder, of north wind nightlong,

The ice-pry and lever beneath, the infinitesimal

Decay of ledge-edge. Suddenly,

I leaped back in terror.

Suppose!

So some days I now go again to see

Lichen creep slow up that

Round massiveness. It creeps

Like Time, and I sit and wonder how long

Since that gneiss, deep in earth,

In a mountain’s womb, under

Unspeakable pressure, in total

Darkness, in unmeasurable

Heat, had been converted

From simple granite, striped now with something

Like glass, harder

Than steel, and I wonder

How long ago, and how, the glacier had found it.

How long and how it had trundled

The great chunk to globe-shape.

Then poised it on ledge-edge, in balanced perfection.

Sun sets. It is a long way

Down, the way darkening. I

Think how long my afternoon

Had seemed. How long

Will the night be?

But how short that time for the great glove

To remember so much!

How much will I remember tonight?