Friday, August the 27th, 2004

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Immortality

Devoted readers of Hooting Yard will no doubt be excited to learn that its onlie begetter has discovered that he has been immortalised in verse. The following is an extract from an essay entitled Owen Barfield's Poetic Diction: An Appreciation by Caryl Johnston. Follow that link if you want to read the whole thing, or spend some time at the Encyclopaedia Barfieldiana, if you so wish. Meanwhile, here is the excerpt:

The discussion between Barfield and Lewis about truth and meaning surfaced in the final poem of Pictures from the Speaking Stillness, “Mode Conceptual.” It is in two parts, and the first part is called “Frank Key.” The poet stands in “turning time,” locked outside the door of spring:

“Outside and gracious in the world / Flowers bloomed, and greening; / But I behind the darkened door / Could find no name for meaning. / It was the nameless ever moving / In the known, but from behind; / Sleeves brushed me by, ideas—/ The clothing of the mind.”

Yet, there is no relief in this brain-bound darkness—the “foldured grot,” which is an improvisation on Keats' “elfin grot.” The foldured grot, like the Belle Dame Sans Merci, holds us prisoner. But someone named Frank Key comes to the rescue:

“I felt my hand inside a key—/ It lightly weighed—no doubt—/ I turned it slowly, and again, / And Frank came to take me out.”

“Frank Key” brings us the mystery of incarnated life: not the key in my hand, but the hand itself the key:

“‘To be,’ he said, 'it turns- / It fills up to the rim---'”

The poet receives this realization of meaning with tangibility:

“So there I was: while speaking / The spring to me had fled—/ Meaning bloomed from word to word—/ As speaking turned, to being said.”

The “being said” — the Being of Meaning, is the essence of this Barfieldian philosophical poem. It is the world of the Logos, of Meaning, that becomes fact, and it is this descent of meaning into fact that the poet must attempt to capture as the truth of things.