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.

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?