At seventy-five, Robert Penn Warren has lost none of his lifelong zest for strenuous nature hikes. In his new book of poems, Being Here, Warren's many excursions through woods, up hillside, across beach and rocky shoreline, run a gamut from sheer relish in the physical exertion—with lapses of muscle to explore a wealth of sensory perceptions—to profound meditations on the nature of Time and “Pure Being.” By a succession of happy accidents, Warren's cross-country rambles lead him to encounters with living or non-living beings that amazingly mirror a profile of the author himself. His incandescent moments of recognition of each of his secret kin in nature submerges him in trance (“I stopped … I stood … I stared,” “I gazed”); the noise and bustle of nature are frozen, momentarily (“no leaf may stir, nor a single blade twitch,” “no bird ever calls”); and his spirit soars into a dimension of pure silence and motionlessness, a haven outside time. He binds himself, steadfastly, to each of his accidental twins, and lingers in this condition of “Platonic Drowse”:

          I stare at the cloud, white, motionless. I cling
To our single existence, timeless, twinned.

Each of these twinnings (with the “lonely … unmoving cloud”; an aged warbler with “beak, unmoving as death”; a drowned monkey, “wild-eyed” and “huddled by volcanic stone”; and a large boulder of gneiss perched on a cliff-ledge) begins as a grateful identification with the other familial being, or entity. Then, Warren enshrines the brief portraits in a reader's memory, lavishing his most tellingly precise description on the unique facets of each identity portrayed:

Where are the warblers? Why, yes, there's one,
Rain-colored like gunmetal now, rain-slick like old oil.
It is motionless in the old stoicism of Nature.
Yes, under a useless maple leaf,
The tail with a fringe of drops, like old Tiffany crystal,
And one drop, motionless, hung at beak-tip.
I see that beak, unmoving as death. …

Never do we sense that the other entity has been deprived of its own pristine native character, nor that Warren, with a cold eye of premeditation, has manipulated the living plasm or stone into literary images and symbols. But while the other being is cherished for its own novel particularity of traits, it undergoes slow transmutation into its role in the poem as emblem of a crucial phase in the journey of Warren's aspiring self in its many crossings-over of the “knife-edge frontier” into “Timelessness.” To outwit Death, the cheat, he would side-step Time.

Each episode in Warren's sequential cycle of Nature poems may be viewed, allegorically, as a milestone of existential discovery in the Spirit's quest for truth about the nature of Time, Fate, God, Death and Being. As in Yeats's “The Circus Animals' Desertion,” the emblematic character of Warren's nature portrayals emerges as an accidental by-product, or “afterthought,” following the spontaneous meeting between persona and alter ego in the unfolding of each poem's drama. Works that begin with raw physicality and joie de vivre end in parable and vision. The strainless ease with which Warren negotiates the gulf from naturalistic incident to complex allegory in the best poems marks out this author's matchless genius among contemporaries.

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The one new poem which I take to be most starkly prototypic of the strategy outlined above is “Globe of Gneiss.” The poem's opening and closing lines are questions, the first capping the longest stanza, the last the shortest, a single-line stanza:

(1) “How heavy is it? Fifteen tons? Thirty? More?”
(2) “How much will I remember tonight?”

These two questions highlight the thematic antipodes, and to trace the many artful shifts in the poem's center of gravity from rock to human, from Gneiss to Warren, is to take the measure of the distance traversed between story and parable in many of the best new poems.

In rhythm and meter, the poem begins with a swift-paced conversational thrust:

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.

The measure is a near approach to metrical regularity until, midway in the first stanza, the line wavers to trimeter, then [back] to pentameter, and finally settles on a two-stress end line (“its monstrous plunge”), a pedestal of sorts, left to bulwark the weight and heft of the somewhat top-heavy verse unit.

This stanza is the only one in “Globe of Gneiss” which, in its reluctance to pull out all the stops and take the headlong plunge into non-measured verse, illustrates “meter-clash,” an intriguing variant of prosody brilliantly defined by Peter Viereck in his recent essay tracing the development of a tendency with roots in the poetry of Shakespeare's plays and proliferating in the work of a handful of today's master prosodists, who work within and against traditional metrics by playing off a few out-of-measure lines against the many in a passage which does scan, regularly. The offbeat lines seem to lean toward the regular stress-count, then break way in one or more metrical feet, beguiling the ear of readers conditioned to fit near-regular lines comfortably into the prevailing pattern. Sparks fly, while readers try, unsuccessfully, to juggle the miscreant lines into fixed moulds which they adamantly resist. For Viereck, I suppose, Shakespeare was having his little private joke of warring against the stolid iambic pentameter, while audiences kept hearing the accustomed fives. The modern poets, however, take some relish in challenging sophisticated readers, and hope to be found out by the more committed devotees. Not incidentally, Warren led Viereck's list as supreme experimenter among today's prosodists. Much in this book could be taken to enhance credibility for Viereck's theory.

But for me, this poem—and other surpassingly crafted works in this assemblage—stands at the “knife-edge frontier” between traditional meter and free verse. A dominant passion shared by a great line of American prosodists ranging from technicians so diverse as William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost—at opposite ends of the continuum from open to closed forms—is the rage to design a meter and line configuration that is modelled after the timbre of the speaking voice, and which appropriates the very accents and aural nuance of colloquial idiom into the measure. How lucky for readers, today, that the central craftsman in verse of our language brings to the aforesaid obsession the practical handicraft of fifty years of expertise in the art of the novel—a master of imaginative prose now diverting a far greater share of his chief energies than in the past from fiction to verse.

Acknowledging my debt to Viereck, then: he has presented as cogent and persuasive an explication as I have read of the special jarring and jangling effects in sound, and scissoring of rhythm (“meter-clash”), that Warren achieves in a number of his best recent poems in couplets, as well as in the first stanza of “Globe of Gneiss,” by first teasing a reader's ear with the expectation of regular tetrameters or pentameters, give-or-take some metrical roughening around the edges in the shape of a poetic half-foot left dangling at the end of a line, now and again; while the exceptional line abruptly diminished or inflated by a whole foot may be felt to reestablish the metrical norm by leaning away from a rhythm it inheringly supports, as by a rule like syncopation in music—the shifts, to one side or the other of the norm, always suggesting the regular beat contained in the voiced beat, but momentarily evaded or submerged.

After many rereadings of the whole poem, I feel it becomes evident that Warren did not set out to employ conventional meter in the first stanza, then abandoning the convention for free verse, when meter no longer suited his purpose, in subsequent stanzas. Only a shoddy inattentive technician would switch from meter to free verse, at whim; rather, the shifting mean of the free verse alters by a consistent rationale, which derives from the changing contours of the poem's images and thematic substance. Perhaps the regular accentual line-measure in much of the first stanza can be taken to articulate the unexpected fixity and immobility of the globe. Yet even in those opening lines, the pattern of stresses in the line is offset by the nervous fragmentation of the spiel, the persona blurting a chain of warnings to himself (“Stop! / Don't go near! Or only on tiptoe. Don't, / For God's sake, be the fool I once was …”). But the speaker, ignoring his own insight and better judgment, can't resist the temptation to try to push the globe off the ledge “with all strength.” His confusion of motives—intuition at odds with physical impulse—may be mirrored by a line rhythm and syntax that appear to be pulling in opposite directions, the regular line length intoning the claims of conservative reason, while the broken syntax of the colloquial voice graphs the pulse of lawless Dionysiac energy.

In the middle of line 6, roughly halfway through the stanza, the meter implodes, the two balanced halves of the line falling into the line center where the repeated word “pushed” supplants the rhythm propelled by the “don't” repeated at the extremities of line 4. The whole stanza seems to collapse on itself at shortened lines 7-8, since the heavy caesura in the middle of line 6 brakes to a halt the swift momentum unleashed by line 4. When the rhythm regains tempo in lines 9-12, the regular pentameters have faded out, displaced by a waveryness of line-scale that prevails for the rest of the poem, a viable instrument which, in its exquisitely-wrought fluctuations, is a true sensitive barometer for shifts in mood, voice, pacing, event: in sum, the poem's craft exhibits the versatility and wide range of expressiveness that is the hallmark of all free verse of a superior order.

Lines 9-11 expand, while the speaker's fantasy—of playing God and tumbling the globe down the cliffside—unfolds. But fantasy, which has outpaced action, is swiftly deflated: the rhythmic speed-up stalls, the line ebbing, again, as one stanza quits and the next commences:

… Its monstrous plunge.
I pushed. It was like trying
To push a mountain …

The rhythm now doubly retarded by “pushed” and “push” starting the two slow lines, the repeated physical word ironically smothers the overtones lingering from the purely mental “crush” and “plunge.” Stanza 2 comprises two distinct rhythms: the rhythm of the spluttery short sentences that begin and end the stanza, both articulating impulsive physical acts of the persona (“I pushed,” “I leaped back in terror”); the rhythm of the single long sentence in the middle, which remarkably uncoils, clause by clause, as the persona's deeper mind envisions stages of the globe's history:

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. Suddenly,
I leaped back in terror.
Suppose!

The abortive fantasy of stanza 1 is displaced by the searching mind's-eye of visionary intelligence. This sentence assembles a chain of phrases which suggest a supersensory penetration and plumbing of the rock's secret life (“incessant / shove,” “ice-pry and lever beneath,” “infinitesimal / decay”): more and more, as the poem proceeds, the rock is perceived to be an organic Being, which has survived a myriad succession of life-stages and has attained an advanced wisdom, coupled with its astounding longevity in years—by human standards.

The quality of language, the texture of line-breaks, and the resilience of sentence syntax moulded around the lines combine forces to suggest the deep intuitive centers of a mind's cognition, slowly permeating the innermost laminae and foliations of this metamorphic rock. The efflorescence of the poet's style, here and in the next longer stanza, strikes the reader's eye and ear as a wonderfully apt investiture—or garb—for the intricate mental processes rendered lucid by the poem's crystalline art.

The discovery of the globe's hidden life came upon the persona accidentally, in a moment of frustration as he recoiled—helpless—from the physical exertion of pushing. The manifestation of Being, presence, identity in the rock was occasioned by “terror,” triggered as much by the unaccustomed flood of cosmic awareness as by the primitive fear of retaliation—the rock, by a will of its own, might push back, toppling, and crush the pusher:

                              … Suddenly,
I leaped back in terror.
Suppose!

But it is the flash of cosmic terror, and its lingering afterglow, that lures Warren the pilgrim-wayfarer to return to this magical site, a devotee revisiting a holy place, periodically, in later life. In the second half of the poem, some time has passed—perhaps days, perhaps half a lifetime. The distance he has travelled in the interim is not temporal, in any case, but has occurred outside time. The pilgrim's change of heart is mirrored in the altered pace of stanza 3, coupled with a serene passivity of mood. Hot blood has indeed cooled, and the slowdown of metabolism enables the speaker to identify with a master of sluggish tempo, the lichen:

So some days I now go again to see
Lichen creep slow up that
Round massiveness …

No longer “the fool I once was,” he comes now to see, not to shove, and to slowly develop phlegmatic second sight:

                                                                                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.

The long sentence that comprises the bulk of stanza 3, one of the most exquisitely modulated passages in all of Warren's free verse, projects the enigma of geologic time as a series of profoundly imaged stages in the conversion of granite into gneiss—a crystallized form of metamorphic rock. The sentence is a coiled spiral, which binds the many interwoven “in”-phrases. The whole stanza moves like a high-powered drill, Warren a geologist boring down into the rock and deciphering—layer by layer—each phase of its terrestrial evolution from samples of shattered stone extracted at graduated depths.

In stanza 2, the speaker was struck by the globe's time-scale, radically different from his own. “It / Had lived through so much,” he pondered, but confining his thoughts to the globe's life-span on the ledge. Now, allured to the globe's previous subterranean existence, he meditates upon the nature of “Time,” focussing the slow trance of his vision upon conjured images of the globe's genesis in the “mountain's womb,” fathered by the “last / Glacier to live in Vermont,” which—in Warren's ecstatic transport of vision—

                                                            … trundled
The great chunk to globe-shape,
Then poised it on ledge-edge, in balanced perfection.

What an achievement, the creation and dexterous balancing of the globe! We don't think to question that both glacier and boulder were/are alive. The glacier was the last survivor of its species in Vermont, the gneiss its offspring and heir, as if glacier and mountain mated to produce the gneiss-child. Warren's vision of the glacier as artist-progenitor is astonishing in its power to illuminate the enigmas of science, such that we come to feel the creation of the gneiss ball was no less a miracle than the creation, say, of a seventy-five-year-old poet's life, which implicit analogy prepares us for the sudden revelation of the final stanzas:

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 globe
To remember so much!
How much will I remember tonight?

The tone, abruptly, shifts, as the discourse tilts to a slant of personal intimacy. The circuit of images—tracing the genesis of the gneiss from birth to maturity—is complete; and by the most effortless refocusing of the angle of vision, the speaker turns his fluoroscopy—refined and perfected by training its x-ray sights on the inner layers of the gneiss—back on his lone figure starting its twilight descent down the cliff-side. The plainness of the poem's final lines and delicate simplicity of syntax belies their freight of accumulated meaning and resonance. As in all true parable, or allegory, meaning has been stored and nurtured, covertly, in images or parts of the story, and a harvest of wisdom now breaks with the force of a hidden swell suddenly tossing up a foamy surf on the shore of the poem's finale. The author, sapiently, trusts the spare plain strokes of the last lines to carry the charge that sweeps, by sheer inescapable force of analogy, from gneiss to man.

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Only once before, in modern American poetry, have we witnessed a similar glacial purity and primitiveness in the brief parables of Stephen Crane, but Crane's elegant miniatures—sweeping out into the same precincts of great impersonal Being—could not have foreseen Warren's unprecedented genius for re-routing the vision back to the strictly mortal passions of his own uniquely vivacious personality.

In “Globe of Gneiss,” the aggressive human ego of the opening stanzas, stymied, mellows into a saintlike human who can commune with stone on its own terms, as St. Francis conversed with birds. Unable to budge the globe with brute muscle, he befriends the rock, encounters it with the slow, full steadfast power of his spiritual intellect. He discovers—by exerting the tenacious grasp of his old man's eagle mind—the beauty and glory of the gneiss's history. Tracing the rock's evolution, he travels backwards in geologic time, epoch by epoch, from the gneiss's present perch (“poised on ledge-edge”), downwards to its embryonic nurturing in the “mountain's womb.” He envisions these prior moments in time with preternatural clarity and incisiveness of detail. A reader, drawn resistlessly into this compelling hallucination back in time and down into the mountain's interior, senses deeply—as he voyages with the poet—the masterful poise of Warren's doubleness of vision: for without sacrificing a vestige of naturalistic detail in portraying the rock, Warren simultaneously finds his own identity mirrored in the gneiss. The gneiss is, by subtle ghostly strokes, transformed into an emblem for Warren's own aging corpus, his weathered physiognomy, his great staying power and vision of himself as one of that precious handful of robust and hardy survivors of his own many-tiered, much-layered succession of human eras.