A Owen Barfield’s Poetry, Drama, and

Fiction: Rider on Pegasus 1st Edition

Hipolito
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/a-owen-barfields-poetry-drama-and-fiction-rider-on-pe
gasus-1st-edition-hipolito/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

A Owen Barfield’s Poetry, Drama, and Fiction: Rider on

Pegasus 1st Edition Hipolito

https://textbookfull.com/product/a-owen-barfields-poetry-drama-
and-fiction-rider-on-pegasus-1st-edition-hipolito/

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

https://textbookfull.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-
loucas/

Fireflies Memory Identity and Poetry 1st Edition David

P. Owen

https://textbookfull.com/product/fireflies-memory-identity-and-
poetry-1st-edition-david-p-owen/

Brief Insights on Mastering Bible Study 80 Expert

Insights Explained in a Single Minute 1st Edition
Michael S. Heiser

https://textbookfull.com/product/brief-insights-on-mastering-
bible-study-80-expert-insights-explained-in-a-single-minute-1st-
edition-michael-s-heiser/
On Attachment The View from Developmental Psychology
1st Edition Rory Owen Ian

https://textbookfull.com/product/on-attachment-the-view-from-
developmental-psychology-1st-edition-rory-owen-ian/

On Attachment The View from Developmental Psychology

1st Edition Rory Owen Ian

https://textbookfull.com/product/on-attachment-the-view-from-
developmental-psychology-1st-edition-rory-owen-ian-2/

A Preface to Wilfred Owen 1st Edition John Purkis

https://textbookfull.com/product/a-preface-to-wilfred-owen-1st-
edition-john-purkis/

The Cambridge Handbook Of The Law Of Algorithms 1st

Edition Woodrow Barfield

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-cambridge-handbook-of-the-
law-of-algorithms-1st-edition-woodrow-barfield/

The Cup of Song: Studies on Poetry and the Symposion

1st Edition Vanessa Cazzato

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-cup-of-song-studies-on-
poetry-and-the-symposion-1st-edition-vanessa-cazzato/
“Jeffrey Hipolito has produced a meticulous analysis of the creative oeuvre
of Owen Barfield, the man known as ‘the first and last Inkling.’ While I was
familiar with Barfield’s philosophy, I knew little about his extensive creative
output; Hipolito has immersed himself in the literary traditions that shaped
Barfield’s creative oeuvre, deftly contextualizing it for his audience.”
––Donna L. Potts, Professor and Chair, Department of
English, Washington State University—author of Howard
Nemerov and Objective Idealism: The Influence of Owen
Barfield

“In a style that is at once erudite, eloquent, insightful, and lucid, Owen
Barfield’s Poetry, Drama, and Fiction: Rider on Pegasus provides the first
comprehensive elucidation of Barfield’s literary and poetic works. Jeffrey
Hipolito illustrates how the well-known themes and perspectives of Barfield’s
philosophical, linguistic, and critical writings are also central to his
imaginative works of fiction, drama, and poetry. Owen Barfield’s Poetry,
Drama, and Fiction: Rider on Pegasus is an indispensable source for future
research on Barfield, which will have to take into account the magnitude
and unity of Barfield’s oeuvre as a writer, poet, and philosopher. In short,
Hipolito makes it clear that a complete understanding of Barfield the
philosopher is only possible when complemented with an understanding of
Barfield the poet (and vice versa).”
––Dr Luke Fischer, University of Sydney
Owen Barfield’s Poetry, Drama, and
Fiction

Owen Barfield influenced a diverse range of writers that includes T.

S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkien, W. H. Auden, Howard Nemerov, and Saul
Bellow, and Owen Barfield’s Poetry, Drama, and Fiction is the first
book to comprehensively explore and assess the literary career of
the “fourth Inkling,” Owen Barfield. It examines his major poems,
plays, and novels, with special attention both to his development
over a seventy-year literary career and to the manifold ways in which
his work responds with power, originality, and insight to modernist
London, the nuclear age, and the dawning era of environmental
crisis. With this volume, it is now possible to place into clear view
the full career and achievement of Owen Barfield, who has been
called the British Heidegger, the first and last Inkling, and the last
Romantic.

Jeffrey Hipolito is the author of Owen Barfield’s Poetic Philosophy:

Meaning and Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2024), and his work has
appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Journal of the History of Ideas, European Romantic Review, Journal
of Inklings Studies, VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center, and
Renascence. He currently serves as the chairperson of the Owen
Barfield Society.
Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century
Literature

Beat Myths in Literature

Revisionist Strategies in Beat Women
Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo

Literature for a Society of Equals

Daniel S. Malachuk

Strategies of Ambiguity
Edited by Matthias Bauer and Angelika Zirker

The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien

Nicholas Birns

Valencian Folktales, Volume 2

Enric Valor
Edited and Translated by Paul Scott Derrick and Maria-Lluïsa Gea-
Valor

Queer Kinship in Sarah Schulman’s AIDS Novels

Jarosław Milewski

Durée as Einstein-In-The-Heart
Mary Butts and Virginia Woolf
Candice Lee Kent
Owen Barfield’s Poetry, Drama, and Fiction
Rider on Pegasus
Jeffrey Hipolito

For more information about this series, please visit:

www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Twentieth-Century-
Literature/book-series/RSTLC
Owen Barfield’s Poetry, Drama,
and Fiction
Rider on Pegasus

Jeffrey Hipolito
First published 2024
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158

and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa

business

© 2024 Jeffrey Hipolito

The right of Jeffrey Hipolito to be identified as author of this work

has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks

or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.

ISBN: 978-1-032-70145-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-70149-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-70147-9 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781032701479

Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
For Anouk

O voi che per la via d’Amor passate

–Dante Alighieri
Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1 A Figured Zodiac: The Tower

2 A Maze of Awakening: English People

3 A Life of Sane Despair: Orpheus, Medea, and Angels at Bay

4 Time Is, Time Was: The Unicorn and Riders on Pegasus

5 And I in Me: Night Operation, Eager Spring, and The Year

Participated

Works Cited
Index
Figures

1.1 William Blake, Europe: A Prophecy, 1794, printed 1795, copy a,

plate 6. Yale Center for British Art, Yale University, New Haven,
Connecticut
1.2 William Blake, Jerusalem, c. 1821, copy e, plate 6. Yale Center
for British Art. Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
1.3 William Blake, The Book of Urizen, 1794, copy c, plate 8. Yale
Center for British Art, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
1.4 William Blake, The Book of Urizen, 1794, copy c, plate 5. Yale
Center for British Art, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
5.1 Albrecht Dürer, Saint John Devouring the Book, from the
Apocalypse, 1497–1498. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York
Acknowledgments

I came to Owen Barfield’s work through my parents, Jane and Terry

Hipolito. I could not have written it without them; my mother,
especially, knew more about Barfield’s life and work than anyone,
and her bibliography of Barfield’s published writings remains
unsurpassed and invaluable. Hazard Adams originally suggested to
me thirty years ago that I write a book about Owen Barfield. I was
not ready to then, but the idea he gave me was a seed that warmed
itself in darkness until it was finally ready to sprout. I was privileged
to know and correspond with Owen Barfield himself. I had no idea at
the time that he was a highly accomplished poet, playwright, and
novelist; like his readers, I knew him then for his intellectual
brilliance, but I was also privileged to witness and benefit from his
incredible generosity and patience. Luke Fischer, another model of
generosity and patience, read every chapter and offered unstinting
encouragement and insightful advice. Special thanks are due to
Owen A. Barfield, the grandson of my subject. He is always
encouraging and helpful, and I am especially grateful that he has
allowed me to quote freely from Barfield’s published and
unpublished writings. I am also grateful to Renascence and the
Journal of Inklings Studies, and their wonderful respective editors
John Curran and Judith Wolfe, for permission to quote parts of
chapters three and four, now heavily revised. My son Michael
smoothed the path of this book with his humor, love, intelligence,
and zest for life. I dedicate this book to Anouk Tompot, who made it
and everything else possible.
Abbreviations

ABS A Barfield Sampler

ES Eager Spring
HEW History in English Words
HGH History, Guilt and Habit
NO Night Operation
O Orpheus
PD Poetic Diction
RCA Romanticism Comes of Age
RM The Rediscovery of Meaning
SA Saving the Appearances
SM Speaker’s Meaning
TEDP This Ever Diverse Pair
TMPP The Tower: Major Poems and Plays
UV Unancestral Voice
WA Worlds Apart
WCT What Coleridge Thought
YP The Year Participated
Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781032701479-1

Nearly forty years ago, Thomas Kranidas, a Milton specialist and

close friend of Owen Barfield in his later years, wrote a now-classic
article in which he argued that

Barfield was primarily a creator, not an analyst, a writer of

considerable achievement, a poet whose experience with the
creative process helped hugely to lead him into those inquiries
which produced Poetic Diction, History in English Words, Saving
the Appearances, What Coleridge Thought, Speaker’s Meaning,
Worlds Apart and History, Guilt and Habit.
(Kranidas, Defiant Lyricism, 24)

Kranidas’ comment was a response to the dominant view, that

Barfield was most notable as a philosopher, philologist, and early
exponent of the “science” of literary criticism.1 It was not common
knowledge then, nor is it today, that as Barfield worked on History in
English Words and Poetic Diction during the 1920s, he was also
writing a major poem, The Tower, and a novel, English People, in
which he recapitulated, expanded, and put to dramatic use the
themes of those more well-known books. Similarly, relatively few
people are aware that during his supposedly fallow years in the
1930s and 1940s Barfield wrote three plays and two more major
poems, The Unicorn and Riders on Pegasus. Likewise, there is little
recognition that Barfield bridged the period from 1950 to 1970—
roughly, the years between two more of his most famous works,
Saving the Appearances and What Coleridge Thought—with a trilogy
that is astonishingly varied in thought and literary form.2 Finally, in
the period of Barfield’s supposedly gentle decline into visiting
professorships and interviews, he wrote two more innovative
novellas and a “paraphrase,” as he called it, titled The Year
Participated. Here too, we must say that Barfield was more active
than he has seemed.
The intervening years since Kranidas’ groundbreaking article have
brought a biography, studies of different aspects of Barfield’s poetics
and philosophy, the publication of his verse drama Orpheus, and an
important anthology of Barfield’s poetry and fiction, A Barfield
Sampler, co-edited by Barfield, Kranidas, and Jeanne Clayton Hunter.
Barfield’s novellas Night Operation and Eager Spring (2009) have
been published, and more recently The Tower: Major Poems and
Plays (2020) has made available Barfield’s three long poems and his
remaining plays. Even so, this is the first study of Barfield as a
literary artist.
Later generations will look back with perplexity on the slow
growth in appreciation for Barfield’s creative work, not only because
of its intrinsic interest and its centrality to his overall achievement
but also because it is an important episode in the literary history of
the twentieth century. To take one small example, T. S. Eliot
published “Dope,” one of Barfield’s early short stories, in The
Criterion. A year earlier, as Eliot prepared to launch the journal, he
said that

its great aim is to raise the standard of thought and writing in

this country by both international and historical comparison.
Among English writers I am combining those of the older
generation who have any vitality and enterprise, with the more
 serious of the younger generation, no matter how advanced, for
instance Mr Wyndham Lewis and Mr Ezra Pound.
(Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1, 710)

For Eliot, Barfield was among the serious writers who raised the
standard of thought and writing in England, and in the 1920s
cultivated him as a possible member of the coterie that included
Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. According to John Kelly, Eliot had
Yeats in mind as the chief example among the older generation that
still had “vitality and enterprise” (Kelly, Eliot and Yeats, 202). It is
fitting, then, that in the July 1923 issue of The Criterion, the first
piece is a portion of Yeats’s autobiography and the second piece is
Barfield’s “Dope.” While at Faber & Gwyer (later Faber & Faber), Eliot
saw into print over the course of thirty-five years both editions of
Poetic Diction (including the jacket blurb for the first edition,
showing there that he had also read History in English Words with
care and appreciation), the second edition of History in English
Words, Saving the Appearances, and Worlds Apart. Eliot sought to
meet Barfield and invited him to contribute to The Criterion, though
for practical reasons he declined to publish The Tower. After the
Second World War, Barfield published a number of poems in The
New English Weekly, which was also frequented by Eliot, though
again Eliot chose not to add Barfield’s The Unicorn to the poetry list
at Faber & Faber. A few years before his death, Eliot wrote to
Barfield unprompted to say that Saving the Appearances was “one of
those books which makes me proud to be a director who publishes
them.” Eliot knew and appreciated Barfield as both a creative and a
critical writer. Though Barfield did not have the central place in
Eliot’s creative and intellectual development occupied by Ezra Pound
or F. H. Bradley, without a better appreciation of Barfield’s complete
oeuvre we cannot know what his impact was. The same is true of
his influence on W. H. Auden and Walter de la Mare, among others.
 Perhaps one reason for the relatively lethargic pace in
appreciating Barfield literary accomplishments is that because he
was a member of the Inklings, he has been seen as fighting the tide
of Modernism. This too is a misconception. Though Barfield primarily
(but not always) wrote in traditional verse forms, he freely adapted
these to his own purposes. Perhaps the most prominent example of
this is his variation on ottava rima in Riders on Pegasus, which
formally and thematically anticipates Auden’s Shield of Achilles.
Likewise, though Barfield has little in common with James Joyce
beyond the shared influence of William Blake and Percy Shelley,
English People uses an apparently third person narrative voice that
turns out to be the developing artist-protagonist in disguise, a
technique pioneered and perfected as part of the Modernist
repertoire by the Irish author of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man and Ulysses. Just as we cannot appreciate Barfield’s impact on
his peers without closer study, so too must we see Barfield as fully a
part of his times to understand his own works.
Hazard Adams coined the phrase “Romantic Modernism” to
capture the unique achievement of Yeats’s A Vision. The phrase also
captures nicely Barfield’s self-perceived relation to his time. Like
Yeats, he took in Blake, Shelley, and Keats through the pores, and
remained committed to their aesthetic in theory and practice alike.
At the same time, he saw that aesthetic as being in productive
dialogue (a relation that in his metaphysics he describes as
“polarity”) with modernity in general and Modernism in particular. Far
from reactively rejecting Modernism, Barfield stayed abreast of it,
finding there poetic and intellectual “friends,” as he called them in
the afterword to the third edition of Poetic Diction (1983). One aim
of this book is to bring out the Janus-faced quality of Barfield’s
creative intelligence, looking back to his Romantic inheritance even
as he brings a penetrating gaze to the present.
The chapters in this book proceed chronologically, in order to
illustrate the gradual unfolding of Barfield’s creative output taken as
a whole. Chapter 1 explores the initial formation of Barfield’s poetic
sensibility, in relation both to his visionary Romantic forbearers and
to the contemporary poet whose gifts he most admired, Walter de la
Mare. It then turns to his first major attempt at neo-Romantic
visionary verse, The Tower, with a special emphasis on its complex,
nuanced allusiveness. Chapter 2 turns to English People, the novel
Barfield wrote while he was also at work on The Tower and Poetic
Diction. This chapter places the novel squarely in the currents of its
times, including what G. R. S. Mead called at the time the “rising
tide” of interest in occultism, while exploring the personal crises of
characters who mirror a broader social apocalypse. Chapter 3 turns
to Barfield’s dramas, which were all written roughly within a decade
of each other. The chapter highlights Barfield’s fully formed
understanding of the origin and purpose of drama, and argues that
they embody the commitment to post-Wagnerian Expressionism and
Symbolism that he advocates in his drama criticism of the previous
decade. Chapter 4 turns to Barfield’s two epic romances, written
after the dramas and in quick succession. The poems reflect the new
reality of the nuclear age, from the minor-key ironies of The Unicorn
to the Blakean and Shelleyan visionary mytho-poetic mode of Riders
on Pegasus. Chapter 5 examines Barfield’s late novellas Night
Operation and Eager Spring as well The Year Participated, his
creative “paraphrase” of Rudolf Steiner’s Soul Calendar. The three
works form a kind of triptych, with Night Operation presenting a
dystopian vision in a satirical response to B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two,
while Eager Spring and The Year Participated (which Barfield wrote
simultaneously) explore the roots of that possible dystopia and offer
a possible remedy in the form of spiritual self-transformation.
Despite its unique tone and form, The Year Participated makes a
fitting coda to Barfield’s seventy-five year career as a writer,
returning to the themes of his first major poem, The Tower, to
remind us that in our beginning, truly, is our end.
Notes
1. For an account of Barfield’s critical and philosophical system, see
my Owen Barfield’s Poetic Philosophy: Imagination and Meaning
(Bloomsbury 2024).
2. For an analysis of the Burgeon trilogy see Hipolito, Owen
Barfield’s Poetic Philosophy.
1 A Figured Zodiac
The Tower

DOI: 10.4324/9781032701479-2

Barfield’s achievement with Poetic Diction and History in English

Words currently eclipses his reputation as a serious poet, but as he
developed his poetics and immersed himself in the combative
London literary scene, he honed his craft as a poet. Barfield strove
no less than Shelley and Eliot to become the “perfect critic” who
could balance synthesis and analysis, poetry and criticism, while
fostering the growth of his imagination. His theoretical work in
poetics and semantics, anthroposophy and metaphysics,
historiography and ethics, is that of a working creative artist
exploring the deeper reaches of his craft, and sharing the results
with his peers.1 This chapter describes what it meant to Barfield to
be a poet in the hurly-burly of post-war literary London and takes a
close look at The Tower, the major poem of this period that he wrote
while he worked on History in English Words, Poetic Diction, and
English People. As we rediscover Barfield’s poetry in light of his
poetics, we see that it too focuses primarily on the relations of
language to consciousness, poetry to meaning, and on the efforts of
modern minds to regain the “living unity” that Barfield believed he
had revealed in his philological research.
 Barfield’s desire to become a poet at all was rooted in his
powerful early encounter with poetic language. He described this
formative event in various places. For example, he noted in the
introductions to the two editions of Romanticism Comes of Age that
during his adolescence he experienced “a sudden and rapid increase
in the intensity with which I experienced lyric poetry.” He
approached it phenomenologically as an unwitting Goethean
scientist: “I kept my attention on the experience itself and was not
attracted by rhetorical explanations which led away from it” (RCA,
18). However, he considered the phenomenon inexplicable, given
“the intellectual vacuum” generated by his “skepticism on all
subjects pertaining to the origin and spiritual nature of man” (RCA,
17). Barfield thus found himself impressed both by “the power with
which not so much whole poems as particular combinations of words
worked on my mind,” and by the concomitant effect that he “felt a
strong impulse to penetrate into [the ‘magical’ experience] and to
reach what, if anything, lay behind it” (RCA, 18).
This epiphany was accompanied by another, of

the way in which my intense experience of poetry reacted on my

apprehension of the outer world. The face of nature, the objects
of art, the events of history and human intercourse betrayed
significances hitherto unknown as the result of precisely . . .
poetic or imaginative combinations of words. . . . I found I knew
things about them which I had not known before.
(RCA, 3)

These descriptions evoke Shelley’s poetics, which is central to Poetic

Diction: metaphors react upon the meanings of their constituent
words, and reveal hitherto unapprehended relations among
phenomena. This experience of poetic language also verges on the
mystical, as it fundamentally alters the relation of the self to inner
and outer phenomena. In many of his poems, Barfield sought to
reach an audience calcified by Eliot and his colleagues into “a little
knot of hollow men, intoning solemn misery” (ABS, 36) with what he
considered to be Wordsworth’s gift “in the Prelude . . . [to] stress
the importance of the productions of fancy for the opening of man’s
eyes to the true spirit of nature” (RCA, 9). To plant a “paradise of
poetry” is the fundamental creative act because “all genuine art is
the result of some degree of supersensible cognition,” as for
example when “one lives with the Spirit of the Earth in a specially
vivid and secure way” (Barfield, Romanticism and Anthroposophy,
120). For Barfield, this is the path out of the wasteland. Barfield
notes the presence of this awareness “in particular . . . throughout
the fourteen books of Wordsworth’s Prelude” (Barfield, Romanticism
and Anthroposophy, 121–122). Barfield’s poetry, no less than his
poetics, was thus part of an effort to “take Romanticism . . .
seriously” at a time when “it seemed to have been attacked on all
sides” (RCA, 5–6). This included a commitment to the methodical
development of what Coleridge called “organs of spirit . . . framed
for a correspondent world” (Coleridge, The Collected Works of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume 7, 1, 242). In his first decade of
work in particular, Barfield saw the poet as a kind of magus, tasked
with leading her contemporaries to an experience of the spiritual,
such that she might help lead a movement of social and cultural
healing.2

The Response to Modernism

As in his poetics, where Barfield positioned himself between the anti-
Romanticism of Eliot and Pound and the neo-Romanticism of D. H.
Lawrence, from the beginning Barfield-the-poet opposed both the
Modernism of Eliot and Pound and the neo-Romanticism of Yeats
and Rilke. A remarkable neo-Blakean prophetic poem of 1951,
“History of English Poetry in the Second Half of the Twentieth
Century,” which Barfield wrote not long after completing his most
ambitious poem, Riders on Pegasus, takes aim not merely at “the
Newtonian age-end” (Barfield, History of English Poetry, 4) but at
Eliot, Pound, and “silly” Auden as “minc[ing] . . . bards” who refused
“to accord nature a psyche” because they “were silk-worms of their
own souls” (Barfield, History of English Poetry, 4). Instead, “with a
sharp eye for the outside,” these poet-catastrophes “make a polite
noise” while “the bright boys . . . observe nature and make notes”
(Barfield, History of English Poetry, 5). Though unfair in manifold
ways to Eliot, Pound, and Auden, the poem makes clear that
Barfield’s poetry is sometimes as combative as his criticism. Another
mid-century poem, “I am much inclined towards a life of ease,” an
unpublished sonnet after the manner of Keats, imagines his
“Magnum Opus”—perhaps Riders on Pegasus—to be “that one which
untwists / Their bays from poets who shirk metaphor / And make
rich words grow obsolete—and leave / Imagination to psychiatrists.”
“Al Fresco (on modern poetry)” is similarly full-throated in its
rejection of Eliot’s dour vers libre:

Who’s for outdoors? Who’s had enough of all this?

Hurl a stone to splinter the sealed-up window,
Pierce the stale-accentual froust, the dreary,
Droned, never-ending,
Sharply flat, sententiously unromantic,
Unctuously startling combinations,
Postured substantival effects—the bleating,
Follow-my-leader,
Cant of curt, contemplative tropes’ detachment!
Half-asleep, chain-smoking . . . among the wine-stains
Smart the conversation—who’s for the open
Lift of a language
Laced with verbs, not frightened of consonants, or
Juxtaposed stressed syllables, fit for breathing,
 Harshly sweet, strong, quantitatively trim, loud,
Shoutable English?
(ABS, 36)

One recognizes Auden in the slovenly chain-smoker, but Barfield

largely aims this poem at Eliot. The critique is similar to the one in
the 1951 preface to Poetic Diction, in which Barfield complains that
in the poetry of Eliot and Auden “language tends to lose its
rhetorical and architectural structure” and that Eliot in particular
“uses metaphor as sparingly as possible” (PD, 36). The poem
suggests by default that Barfield strove in his own poetry for the
qualities he admired. Poetry should be formal, trope-filled, active,
accentual, compact, and “shoutable.” In short, Barfield accepted,
argued for, and hoped to exemplify the enduring value of Keats’s
advice to Shelley, to “load every rift with ore.”
In opposition to those contemporaries who were unable to
“accord nature a psyche,” Barfield embraced Wordsworth’s doctrine
of the correspondent breeze, of the “Wisdom and Spirit of the
universe” that is the “Soul that art the eternity of thought / That
giv’st to form and images a breath” (Wordsworth, The Prelude, 24).3
Barfield’s poems are also often mystical, searching, and inward,
exploring what he describes in The Tower as “the eternal mystery of
light / Ever recurring now to memory” (TMPP, 75). The “holy awe”
with which Barfield counsels his readers to set out and explore the
world at the end of History in English Words is literal and fitting; it is
also a gloss on the lines from Wordsworth’s Excursion with which he
closes that book.
So too, though Barfield experiments with free verse, his
commitment to traditional poetic forms is part of his intense study of
the evolution of consciousness—the eternal mystery of light is
reflected in the shimmering cultural memory woven into language,
no less than in Wordsworth’s prescription of tranquil personal
memory recollecting and reflecting on the heart’s passions. “On [the]
subject [of meter],” C. S. Lewis wrote in his journal, “Barfield has
probably forgotten more than I will ever know” (Lewis, All My Road
Before Me, 53), and Barfield’s experiments with verse forms from
Horatian meters to ballads, blank verse, sonnets, ottava rima, and so
on, are efforts to enter via poetic form into the iridescent river of the
history of consciousness as it meanders in, and by means of, poetic
language.
The many poetry reviews Barfield wrote in the 1920s also cast
light on the development of his poetic sensibility. They show an early
commitment to originality, despite his equal commitment to
traditional forms: he is especially alert that “when an Oxford poet is
compelled to reveal lack of originality, [he] usually shows it by an
extra effort to be original” (Barfield, Ballads, 701). One of the forms
that nearly compels imitation, or an imitative effort to be original, is
the ballad. The ballad may have suffered a nadir of interest in 1920
—the year Pound, Eliot, and Yeats published Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley, Ara Vos Prec, and “The Second Coming,” respectively—
but for Barfield ballads “defy the aesthetic canons; for even those
that unquestionably were beautiful the moment they were created
are ever mellowing, in some mysterious way, with age” (Barfield,
Ballads, 701). Recalling Schiller’s distinction between naïve and
sentimental poetry, Barfield argues that “the pathos of ancient
simplicity can never be quite the same as the pathos of simplicity
itself” (Barfield, Ballads, 701). Thus, in the history of the ballad “we
have the spirit behind the dates and genealogical trees. They are a
cross-section of the history of a religion—part of humanity’s reaction
to the Universe—and the cross-section marks every detail of the
growth at that point” (Barfield, Ballads, 702). We rightly anticipate
that Barfield’s modern ballads are self-aware attempts to recover
ancient unity that acknowledge the impossibility of doing so; that
they are “sentimental” in Schiller’s sense, historically self-aware
recreations of a vanished “pathos of ancient simplicity” (Barfield,
Ballads, 701).
 In reviewing Edmund Blunden’s The Shepherd, a collection that
owes much to the then-neglected Romantic-era poet John Clare,
Barfield suggests that Blunden would do well “to follow the advice
which Keats sent to Clare.” That advice, according to John Taylor
(who published Keats and Clare, and passed messages between
them), was that “the Description too much prevailed over the
Sentiment” (Storey, John Clare: The Critical Heritage, 120). For
Barfield, who reveals his underlying Keatsian aesthetic in his critique,
Blunden shares with Clare a “bent for pure description” that
minimizes “passion and music” to an excessive degree (Barfield,
Review The Shepherd and Other Poems, 603). The underlying fault
is with Clare, who for Barfield remains a “minor poet” because he
wrote “many conventional and derivative poems” (Barfield, John
Clare, 371). On the whole, Barfield finds that among Clare’s poems,
“seventy-five per cent. is that quiet nature-poetry common to many
minor poets, twenty per cent. is John Clare alloyed with Wordsworth
and Burns, and five per cent. is John Clare speaking with his own
voice” (Barfield, John Clare, 371). The saving five percent includes
Clare’s asylum poems, which Barfield finds “curiously anticipatory of
some of Walter de la Mare’s work” (Barfield, John Clare, 371).

The Modern Romantic: Walter de la Mare

The reference to de la Mare is notable, as the older poet (later
Barfield’s close friend) would remain a kind of model for Barfield. Six
weeks before his review of Clare appeared, Barfield published a
review of de la Mare’s Poems 1901–1918. De la Mare is the only
contemporary author besides C. S. Lewis about whom Barfield wrote
more than one essay, and the only one whom he consistently
praised. Already in 1920, he concludes that “among purely lyric
poets Mr. Walter de la Mare will hold a very high place,” though he
wonders “whether his habitual brevity will make posterity deny him a
place among great poets” (Barfield, Walter de la Mare, 142). After
de la Mare’s death in 1956, Barfield described him as having “a
permanent place among the English poets” (Barfield, Walter de la
Mare, Anthroposophical Quarterly, 7). By 1973, the centenary of de
la Mare’s birth, the poet’s reputation had eroded enough that
Barfield can now “look back” on his past prominence and be content
to assert that he is “venturing to write about” de la Mare’s poetry
because it “does not really ‘fit’ into any of the received categories,
although it has been confidently pigeonholed by a good many critics
since the slaughter of the Georgian tradition was accomplished,
almost overnight, by T. S. Eliot” (Barfield, Poetry in Walter de la Mare
, 69).
Barfield’s three essays about de la Mare offer penetrating sidelong
glances at the guiding contemporary lights of his poetic practice,
though Barfield was not a disciple or student of de la Mare, and did
not often try to emulate his work. The 1920 review, for example,
though it begins by aligning de la Mare with Coleridge’s “witchery by
daylight,” singles out Wordsworthian qualities for special note: de la
Mare is “personally and magically intimate” with nature (Barfield,
Walter de la Mare, 141) and “under Mr. de la Mare’s touch . . . the
most commonplace of inanimate objects . . . take on . . . [an]
intensely individual quality” (Barfield, Walter de la Mare, 141). This is
Wordsworth’s task of “natural supernaturalism” in the Lyrical Ballads,
and the opposite of Coleridge’s job of naturalizing the supernatural.
De la Mare, a one-man Lyrical Ballads, seems to combine both sides
of the Wordsworth–Coleridge polarity into a single poetic project: he
“is always somehow personally intimate” with the “elves and fairies”
(Barfield, Walter de la Mare, 140) that populate his early poems
even as “his astonishingly subtle use of half-words and apparently
meaningless interjections” contains a “music, which, like Coleridge’s,
becomes unearthly to match the subject” (Barfield, Walter de la
Mare, 141).
 Barfield’s final article on de la Mare’s poetry focuses once again
on the “peculium” that constitutes his “contribution to the corpus of
English literature” (Barfield, Poetry in Walter de la Mare, 70). Barfield
defends de la Mare’s use of Romantic diction despite the many bad
poets who labor under “the illusion that I must be writing poetry
because I am using the sort of diction other poets . . . have used in
the past” (Barfield, Poetry in Walter de la Mare, 72). He also defends
de la Mare from critics like Leavis who condemn his lack of
psychological realism by countering that

on closer inspection . . . we find that “modern consciousness”

means, not all that life can afford, but a certain constricted
outlook on life which is shared in common by those among us
who have swallowed, hook, line and sinker, the Locke—Newton—
Darwin—Freud—H. G. Wells mélange and are still striving to
digest it.
(Barfield, Poetry in Walter de la Mare, 75)

Barfield praises de la Mare’s freedom from the Anglo-materialist

mélange, and his use of poetic diction and poetic license (a topic on
which Barfield wrote an important preface to his own major
Romantic poem, Riders on Pegasus). In this way, de la Mare set an
important example in opposing the poetic-critical school that Barfield
believed descended from that of Locke, “the Eliot-Pound-Leavis-
Chicago-and-after canon that you took in through your pores in the
English Department” (Barfield, Poetry in Walter de la Mare, 79). In
this late portrait, completed after Barfield had largely finished his
own poetic career, we see an oblique self-portrait of the iconoclastic
Modernist Romantic, who uses archaic diction, inversions, and a host
of other sins with full self-awareness, in order to achieve ends
otherwise unattainable.
In the years between these articles, Barfield became a close
friend of de la Mare. Their friendship grew because “Barfield’s
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
have taken the food out of it. Much of this water passes out through
the leaves.
You know when you are very warm, you feel a moisture come on
your skin. That was once water in your blood. It creeps out through
tiny pores over all your skin.
The plant skin has such pores. The water goes off through them.
When the plant breathes out this water, then more hurries up through
the cells to take its place. So the sap keeps running up and down all
the time.
Plants not only send out water through the pores of the leaves, but
also a kind of air or gas. If they did not do that, we should soon all be
dead. Can I make that plain to you?
Did you ever hear your mother say, “The air here is bad or close”?
Did you ever see your teacher open a door or a window, to “air” the
schoolroom? If you ask why, you will be told “So many people
breathing here make the air bad.”
How does our breathing make the air bad? When our blood runs
through our bodies it takes up little bits of matter that our bodies are
done with. This stuff makes the blood dark and thick. But soon the
blood comes around to our lungs.
Now as we breathe out, we send into the air the tiny atoms of this
waste stuff. It is carbonic acid gas. As we breathe in, we take from
the fresh air a gas called oxygen. That goes to our lungs, and lo! it
makes the blood fresh and clean, and red once more.
So you can see, that when many people breathe in one room they
will use up all the good clean air. At the same time they will load the
air of the room with the gas they breathe out.
That is why the window is opened. We wish to sweep away the bad
air, and let in good air.
But at this rate, as all men and other animals breathe out carbonic
acid gas, why does not all the air in the world get bad? Why, when
they all use oxygen, do they not use up all the oxygen that is in the
world?
Just here the plants come in to help. Carbonic acid gas is bad for
men, it is food to plants. Oxygen is needed by animals, but plants
want to get rid of it. Animals breathe out a form of carbon and
breathe in oxygen. Plants do just the other thing. They breathe out
oxygen and take in carbonic acid gas.
The air, loaded with this, comes to the plant. At once all the little leaf-
mouths are wide open to snatch out of the air the carbonic acid gas.
And, as the plants are very honest little things, they give where they
take away. They take carbon from the air, and breathe into the air a
little oxygen.
Where did they get that? The air they breathe has both carbon and
oxygen in it. So they keep what they want,—that is, carbon,—and
send out the oxygen.
Now it is only the green part of the plant that does this fine work for
us. It is the green parts, chiefly the leaves, that send out good
oxygen for us to breathe. It is the green leaf that snatches from the
air those gases which would hurt us.
It is the green leaf that changes the harmful form of carbon into good
plant stuff, which is fit for our food. How does it do that? Let us see.
What makes a leaf green? Bobby who crushed a leaf to see, told me
“a leaf was full of green paint.”
Inside the green leaves is a kind of green paste, or jelly. Now it is this
“leaf-green” that does all the work. The “leaf-green” eats up carbon.
The “leaf-green” turns carbon into nice safe plant material. It is “leaf-
green” that sets free good oxygen for us.
“Leaf-green” is a good fairy, living in every little cell in the leaf. Leaf-
green is a fairy which works only in the day-time. Leaf-green likes
the sun. Leaf-green will not work in the dark, but goes to bed and
goes to sleep!
In such simple lessons as these, I can tell you only a little of what is.
The deep “how” and “why” of things I cannot explain. Even the very
wisest men do not know all the how and the why of the “leaf-green”
fairy.
I have told you these few things that you may have wonders to think
of when you see green leaves. After this lesson, will you not care
more for seeds and leaves than you ever did before?
 LESSON VIII.
THE COLOR OF PLANTS.
Almost the first thing that you will notice about a plant is its color. The
little child, before it can speak, will hold out its hands for a bright red
rose, or a golden lily. I think the color is one of the most wonderful
things about a plant.
Come into the field. Here you see a yellow buttercup, growing near a
white daisy. Beside them is a red rose. Close by, blooms a great
purple flower. All grow out of the same earth, and breathe the same
air. Yet how they differ in color.
Some flowers have two or three colors upon each petal. Have you
not seen the tulip with its striped blossoms, and the petunias spotted
with white and red?
The flower of the cotton plant changes in color. Within a few days
this flower appears in three distinct hues. The chicory blossom
changes from blue to nearly white as the day grows warm.
Look at your mother’s roses. Some are white, others are red, pink, or
yellow. None are ever blue.
Then look at a wild-rose tree. The root and stem are brown. The
green color is in the leaves, and in some of the stems. The petals
are red. The stamens and pistils are yellow.
You never saw the red color get astray and run into the leaves. The
leaf-green did not lose itself, and travel up to the petals. The
stamens and pistils did not turn brown instead of golden.
Does not that seem a wonder, now that you think of it? Perhaps you
never noticed it before. It is one thing to see things, and another to
notice them so that you think about them.
Here is another fact about color in plants. All summer you see that
the leaves are green. In the autumn they begin to change. You wake
up some fine frosty morning and the tree leaves are all turned red,
yellow, brown, or purple. It is a fine sight.
It is the going away of the leaf-green from the leaf that begins the
change of leaf-color in the fall. The leaves have done growing. Their
stems are hard and woody. They do not breathe as freely as they
did. The sap does not run through them as it did early in the season.
The leaf-green shrinks up in the cells. Or, it goes off to some other
part of the plant. Sometimes part of it is destroyed. Then the leaves
begin to change.
Sometimes a red sap runs into the leaf cells. Or, an oily matter goes
there, in place of the “leaf-green.”
The leaf-green changes color if it gets too much oxygen. In the
autumn the plant does not throw out so much oxygen. What it keeps
turns the leaf-green from green to red, yellow, or brown.
The bright color in plants is not in the flower alone. You have seen
that roots and seeds have quite as bright colors as blossoms. What
flowers are brighter than many fruits are?
The cherry is crimson, or pink, or nearly black. What a fine yellow,
red, purple, we find in plums! Is there any yellow brighter than that of
the Indian corn? Is there a red gayer than you find on the apples you
like so well? What is more golden than a heap of oranges?
If you wish to find splendid color in a part of a plant, look at a water-
melon. The skin is green marked with pale green, or white. Next,
inside, is a rind of pale greenish white. Then comes a soft, juicy,
crimson mass. In that are jet black seeds.
Oh, where does all this color come from? Why is it always just in the
right place? The melon rind does not take the black tint that belongs
to the seeds. The skin does not put on the crimson of the pulp. See,
too, how this color comes slowly, as the melon ripens. At first the
skin is of the same dark green as the leaves, and inside all is of a
greenish white.
Let us try to find out where all this color comes from. Do you know
we ourselves can make changes in the color of flowers? Take one of
those big hydrangeas. It has a pink flower. But give it very rich black
earth to grow in. Mix some alum and iron with the earth. Water it with
strong bluing water. Lay soot and coal-dust upon the earth it grows
in. Very soon your hydrangea will have blue flowers, instead of pink
ones.
Once I had a petunia with large flowers of a dirty white color. I fed it
with soot and coal-dust. I watered it with strong bluing water. After a
few weeks my petunia had red or crimson flowers. Some of the
flowers were of a very deep red. Others were spotted with red and
white.
Now from this you may guess that the plant obtains much of its color
from what it feeds on in the soil.
But you may give the plant very good soil, and yet if you make it
grow in the dark, it will have almost no color. If it lives at all, even the
green leaves will be pale and sickly.
This will show you that the light must act in some way on what the
plant eats, to make the fine color.
The plant, you know, eats minerals from the earth. In its food it gets
little grains of coloring stuff.
But how the color goes to the right place we cannot tell. We cannot
tell why it is, that from the same earth, in the same light, there will be
flowers of many colors. We cannot tell why flowers on the same
plant, or parts of the same flower, will have different colors. That is
one of the secrets and wonders that no one has found out.
There are many plants which store up coloring matter, just as plants
store up starch, or sugar. The indigo, which makes our best blue
dye, comes from a plant. Ask your mother to show you some indigo.
When the plant is soaked in water the coloring stuff sinks to the
bottom of the water, like a blue dust.
Did you ever notice the fine red sumac? That gives a deep yellow
dye. The saffron plant is full of a bright orange color. Other plants
give other dyes.
Sometimes children take the bright petals of plants, or stems, that
have bright color in them, to paint with. Did you ever do that? You
can first draw a picture, and then color it, by rubbing on it the colored
parts of plants.
Some trees and plants, from which dyes are made, have the coloring
stuff in the bark or wood. That is the way with the logwood tree. The
best black dye is made from that.
You have seen how much dark red juice you can find in berries. Did
you ever squeeze out the red juice of poke or elder berries? It is like
red ink. Did you ever notice how strawberries stain your fingers red?
Grapes and blackberries make your lips and tongue purple.
No doubt you have often had your hands stained brown, for days,
from the husks of walnuts. All these facts will show you what a deal
of color is taken up from the soil by plants, changed by the sun, and
stored up in their different parts.
But the chief of all color in the plant is the leaf-green. We cannot
make a dye out of that.
Leaf-green is the color of which there is the most. It is the color
which suits the eye best of all. How tired we should be of crimson or
orange grass!
Though leaves and stems are generally green, there are some
plants which have stems of a bright red or yellow color. Yellow is the
common color for stamens and pistils. In some plants, as the tulip,
the peach, and others, the stamens are of a deep red-brown, or
crimson, or pink, or even black color.
 LESSON IX.
THE MOTION OF PLANTS.
If I ask you what motion plants have, I think you will tell me that they
have a motion upward. You will say that they “grow up.” You will not
say that they move in the wind. You know that that is not the kind of
motion which I mean.
Some plants grow more by day, some by night. On the whole, there
is more growing done by day than by night. At night it is darker,
cooler, and there is more moisture in the air. The day has more heat,
light, and dryness. For these causes growth varies by day and by
night.
Warmth and moisture are the two great aids to the growth of plants.
Heat, light, and wet have most to do with the motion of plants. For
the motion of plants comes chiefly from growth.
The parts of the plant the motion of which we shall notice, are, the
stems, leaves, tendrils, and petals. Perhaps you have seen the
motion of a plant stem toward the sunshine.
Did you ever notice in house plants, that the leaves and branches
turn to the place from which light comes to them? Did you ever hear
your mother say that she must turn the window plants around, so
that they would not grow “one-sided”?
Did you ever take a pot plant that had grown all toward one side, and
turn it around, and then notice it? In two or three weeks you would
find the leaves, stems, branches, bent quite the other way. First they
lifted up straight. Then they slowly bent around to the light.
Perhaps you have noticed that many flower stems stoop to the east
in the morning. Then they move slowly around. At evening you find
them bending toward the west.
This is one motion of stems. Another motion is that of long, weak
stems, such as those of the grape-vine or morning-glory. They will
climb about a tree or stick.
Such vines do much of their climbing by curling around the thing
which supports them. If you go into the garden, and look at a bean-
vine, you will see what fine twists and curves it makes about the
beanpole.
Such twists or curves can be seen yet more plainly in a tendril. A
tendril is a little string-like part of the plant, which serves it for hands.
Sometimes tendrils grow out of the tips of the leaves.
Sometimes they grow from the stem. Sometimes they grow from the
end of a leaf-stem in place of a final leaf.
Tendrils, as I told you before, are twigs, leaves, buds, or other parts
of a plant, changed into little, long clasping hands.
Now and then the long slender stem of a leaf acts as a tendril. It
twists once around the support which holds up the vine. Thus it ties
the stem of the vine to the support.
You have seen not only climbing plants, such as the grape-vine. You
have seen also creeping plants, as the strawberry and ground-ivy.
You will tell me that a climbing plant is one which travels up
something. You will say, also, that a creeping plant is a vine which
runs along the ground.
The climbing plant helps itself along by tendrils. The creeping plant
has little new roots to hold it firm.
Look at the strawberry beds. Do you see some long sprays which
seem to tie plant to plant? Your father will tell you that they are
“runners.”
The plant throws out one of these runners. Then at the end of the
runner a little root starts out, and fastens it to the ground. A runner is
very like a tendril. There are never any leaves upon it. But the end of
a tendril never puts out a bud. The end of the runner, where it roots,
puts out a bud.
This bud grows into a new plant. The new plant sends out its
runners. These root again, and so on. Thus, you see, a few
strawberry plants will soon cover a large space of ground.
There is a very pretty little fern, called the “walking fern,” which has
an odd way of creeping about. When the slender fronds[8] reach their
full length, some of the tallest ones bend over to the earth. The tip of
the frond touches the ground. From that tip come little root-like
fibres, and fix themselves in the earth. A new plant springs up from
them.
When the new plant is grown, a frond of that bends over and takes
root again. So it goes on. Soon there is a large, soft, thick mat of
walking fern upon the ground.
This putting out new roots to go on by is also the fashion of some
climbing plants. Did you ever notice how the ivy will root all along a
wall? Little strong roots put out at the joints of the stem, and hold the
plant fast.
All this motion in plants is due to growth. In very hot lands where
there is not only much heat, but where long, wet seasons fill the
earth with water, the growth of plants is very rapid.
In these hot lands, there are more climbing plants than in cool lands.
Some trees, which, in cool lands where they grow slowly, never
climb, turn to climbers in hot lands.
Some plants will twine and climb in hot weather, and stand up
straight alone in cool weather. This shows that in hot weather they
grow so fast that they cannot hold themselves up. When it is cool,
they grow slowly, and make more strong fibre. But we must leave the
stem motions of plants and speak of the motion of other parts.
Let me tell you how to try the leaf motion of plants. Take a house
plant to try, as that is where wind will not move the leaf. Get a piece
of glass about four or five inches square. Smoke it very black.
Lay it under the leaf, so that the point of the leaf bent down will be
half an inch from the glass.
Then take a bristle from a brush and put it in the tip of the leaf. Run
the bristle in the leaf so that the end will come beyond the leaf, and
just touch the glass. Leave it a night and a day. Then you will find the
story of the leaf’s travels written on the glass. As the leaf moves, the
bristle will write little lines in the black on the glass. Try it.
As you have proved the motion of the leaf with your smoked glass,
let us look at leaf motion. There is, first, that motion which unfolds or
unrolls the leaf from the bud. That is made because, by feeding, the
plant is growing larger, and the leaf needs more room.
The leaf often has, after it is grown, a motion of opening and
shutting. Other leaves have a motion of rising and falling. But of
these motions I will tell you in another lesson.
Flowers have, first, the motion by which the flower-bud unfolds to the
full, open blossom. That, as the leaf-bud motion, comes from
growing. Did you ever watch a rose-bud, or a lily-bud, unfold?
Then the flowers of many plants have a motion of opening and
shutting each day. I shall tell you of that, also, in another lesson.
Besides these motions in plants, there are others. Did you ever see
how a plant will turn, or bend, to grow away from a stone, or
something, that is in its way?
If you watch with care the root of one of your bean-seeds, you will
see that it grows in little curves, now this way, now that. It grows so,
even when it grows in water, or in air, where nothing touches it.
People who study these changes tell us that the whole plant, as it
grows, has a turning motion. In this motion all the plant, and all its
parts, move around as they grow.
The curious reasons for this motion of plants, you must learn when
you are older. I can now tell you only a little about it. I will tell you that
the plant moves, because the little cells in it grow in a one-sided way.
Thus the air, light, heat, moisture, cause the cells on one side of the
plant to grow larger than the others. Then the plant stoops, or is
pulled over, that way. It is bent over by the weight. Then that side is
hidden, and the other side has more light, heat, and wet. And as the
cells grow, it stoops that way.
This is easy to understand in climbing plants. Their long, slim stems
are weak. They bend with their own weight. They bend to the side
that is slightly heavier. Their motion then serves to find them a
support. As they sweep around, they touch something which will hold
them up. Then they cling to it.
Now, there is another reason for a tendril taking hold of anything.
The skin of the tendril is very soft and fine. As it lies against a string,
or stick, or branch, the touch of this object on its fine skin makes the
tendril bend, or curl.
It keeps on bending or curling, until it gets quite around the object
which it touches. Then it still goes on bending, and so it gets around
a second time, and a third, and so on. Thus the tendril makes curl
after curl, as closely and evenly as you could wind a string on a stick.
Some plants, as the hop, move around with the sun; other plants
move in just the other direction. It is as if some turned their faces,
and some their backs, to the sun.

FOOTNOTES:
[8] What you call the leaf of a fern is, properly speaking, a frond.
 LESSON X.
PLANTS AND THEIR PARTNERS.
Did I not tell you that the plants had taken partners and gone into
business? I said that their business was seed-growing, but that the
result of the business was to feed and clothe the world.
In our first lessons we showed you that we get all our food, clothes,
light, and fuel, first or last, from plants. “Stop! stop!” you say. “Some
of us burn coal. Coal is a mineral.” Yes, coal is a mineral now, but it
began by being a vegetable. All the coal-beds were once forests of
trees and ferns. Ask your teacher to tell you about that.
If all these things which we need come from plants, we may be very
glad that the plants have gone into business to make more plants.
Who are these partners which we told you plants have? They are the
birds and the insects. They might have a sign up, you see, “Plant,
Insect & Co., General Providers for Men.”
Do let us get at the truth of this matter at once! Do you remember
what you read about the stamens and pistils which stand in the
middle of the flower? You know the stamens carry little boxes full of
pollen. The bottom of the pistil is a little case, or box, full of seed
germs.
You know also that the pollen must creep down through the pistils,
and touch the seed germs before they can grow to be seeds. And
you also know, that unless there are new seeds each year the world
of plants would soon come to an end.
Now you see from all this that the stamens and pistils are the chief
parts of the flower. The flower can give up its calyx, or cup, and its
gay petals, its color, honey, and perfume. If it keeps its stamens and
pistils, it will still be a true seed-bearing flower.
It is now plain that the aim of
the flower must be to get
that pollen-dust safely
landed on the top of the
pistil.
You look at a lily, and you
say, “Oh! that is very easy.
Just let those pollen boxes
fly open, and their dust is
sure to hit the pistil, all right.”
But not so fast! Let me tell
you that many plants do not
carry the stamens and pistils
all in one flower. The
stamens, with the pollen
boxes, may be in one flower,
and the pistil, with its sticky
cushion to catch pollen, may
be in another flower.
More than that, these
flowers, some with stamens, THE THREE PARTNERS.
and some with pistils, may
not even be all on one plant! Have you ever seen a poplar-tree? The
poplar has its stamen-flowers on one tree, and its pistil-flowers on
another. The palm-tree is in the same case.
Now this affair of stamen and pistil and seed making does not seem
quite so easy, does it? And here is still another fact. Seeds are the
best and strongest, and most likely to produce good plants, if the
pollen comes to the pistil, from a flower not on the same plant.
This is true even of such plants as the lily, the tulip, and the
columbine, where stamens and pistils grow in one flower.
Now you see quite plainly that in some way the pollen should be
carried about. The flowers being rooted in one place cannot carry
their pollen where it should go. Who shall do it for them?
Here is where the insect comes in. Let us look at him. Insects vary
much in size. Think of the tiny ant and gnat. Then think of the great
bumble bee, or butterfly. You see this difference in size fits them to
visit little or big flowers.
You have seen the great bumble bee busy in a lily, or a trumpet
flower. Perhaps, too, you have seen a little ant, or gnat, come
crawling out of the tiny throat of the thyme or sage blossom. And you
have seen the wasp and bee, busy on the clover blossom or the
honeysuckle.
Insects have wings to take them quickly wherever they choose to go.
Even the ant, which has cast off its wings,[9] can crawl fast on its six
nimble legs.
Then, too, many insects have a long pipe, or tongue, for eating. You
have seen such a tongue on the bee.[10] In this book you will soon
read about the butterfly, with its long tube which coils up like a watch
spring.
With this long tube the insect can poke into all the slim cups, and
horns, and folds, of the flowers of varied shapes.
Is it not easy to see that when the insect flies into a flower to feed, it
may be covered with the pollen from the stamens? Did you ever
watch a bee feeding in a wild rose? You could see his velvet coat all
covered with the golden flower dust.
Why does the insect go to the flower? He does not know that he is
needed to carry pollen about. He never thinks of seed making. He
goes into the flower to get food. He eats pollen sometimes, but
mostly honey.
In business, you know, all the partners wish to make some profit for
themselves. The insect partner of the flower has honey for his gains.
The flower lays up a drop of honey for him.
In most flowers there is a little honey. Did you ever suck the sweet
drop out of a clover, or a honeysuckle? This honey gathers in the
flower about the time that the pollen is ripe in the boxes. Just at the
time that the flower needs the visit of the insects, the honey is set
ready for them.
Into the flower goes the insect for honey. As it moves about, eating,
its legs, its body, even its wings, get dusty with pollen. When it has
eaten the honey of one flower, off it goes to another. And it carries
with it the pollen grains.
As it creeps into the next flower, the pollen rubs off the insect upon
the pistil. The pistil is usually right in the insect’s way to the honey.
The top of the pistil is sticky, and it holds the pollen grains fast. So
here and there goes the insect, taking the pollen from one flower to
another.
But stop a minute. The pollen from a rose will not make the seed
germs of a lily grow. The tulip can do nothing with pollen from a
honeysuckle. The pollen of a buttercup is not wanted by any flower
but a buttercup. So of all. The pollen to do the germ any good must
come from a flower of its own kind.
What is to be done in this case? How will the insect get the pollen to
the right flower? Will it not waste the clover pollen on a daisy?
Now here comes in a very strange habit of the insect. Insects fly
“from flower to flower,” but they go from flowers of one kind to other
flowers of the same kind. Watch a bee. It goes from clover to clover,
not from clover to daisy.
Notice a butterfly. It flits here and there. But you will see it settle on a
pink, and then on another pink, and on another, and so on. If it
begins with golden rod, it keeps on with golden rod.
God has fixed this habit in insects. They feed for a long time on the
same kind of flowers. They do this, even if they have to fly far to
seek them. If I have in my garden only one petunia, the butterfly
which feeds in that will fly off over the fence to some other garden to
find another petunia. He will not stop to get honey from my sweet
peas.
Some plants have drops of honey all along up the stem to coax ants
or other creeping insects up into the flower.
But other plants have a sticky juice along the stem, to keep crawling
insects away. In certain plants the bases of the leaf-stems form little
cups, for holding water. In this water, creeping insects fall and drown.
Why is this? It is because insects that would not properly carry the
pollen to another flower, would waste it. So the plant has traps, or
sticky bars, to keep out the kind of insects that would waste the
pollen, or would eat up the honey without carrying off the pollen.
I have not had time to tell you of the many shapes of flowers. You
must notice that for yourselves.
Some are like cups, some like saucers, or plates, or bottles, or bags,
or vases. Some have long horns, some have slim tubes or throats.
Some are all curled close about the stamens and pistils.
These different kinds of flowers need different kinds of insects to get
their pollen. Some need bees with thick bodies. Some need
butterflies with long, slim tubes. Some need wasps with long, slender
bodies and legs. Some need little creeping ants, or tiny gnats.
Each kind of flower has what will coax the right kind of insects, and
keep away the wrong ones. What has the plant besides honey to
coax the insect for a visit? The flower has its lovely color, not for us,
but for insects. The sweet perfume is also for insects.
Flowers that need the visits of moths, or other insects that fly by
night, are white or pale yellow. These colors show best at night.
Flowers that need the visits of day-flying insects, are mostly red,
blue, orange, purple, scarlet.
There are some plants, as the grass, which have no sweet perfume
and no gay petals. I have told you of flowers which are only a small
brown scale with a bunch of stamens and pistils held upon it. And
they have no perfumes. These flowers want no insect partners. Their
partner is the summer wind! The wind blows the pollen of one plant
to another. That fashion suits these plants very well.
So, by means of insect or wind partners, the golden pollen is carried
far and wide, and seeds ripen.
But what about the bird partners? Where do they come in?
If the ripe seed fell just at the foot of the parent plant, and grew
there, you can see that plants would be too much crowded. They
would spread very little. Seeds must be carried from place to place.
Some light seeds, as those of the thistle, have a plume. The maple
seeds have wings. By these the wind blows them along.
But most seeds are too heavy to be wind driven. They must be
carried. For this work the plant takes its partner, the bird.
To please the eye of the bird, and attract it to the seed, the plant has
gay-colored seeds. Also it has often gay-colored seed cases. The
rose haws, you know, are vivid red. The juniper has a bright blue
berry. The smilax has a black berry. The berries of the mistletoe are
white, of the mulberry purple.
These colors catch the eye of the bird. Down he flies to swallow the
seed, case, and all. Also many seed cases, or covers, are nice food
to eat. They are nice for us. We like them. But first of all they were
spread out for the bird’s table.
Birds like cherries, plums, and strawberries. Did you ever watch a
bird picking blackberries? The thorns do not bother him. He swallows
the berries fast,—pulp and seed.
You have been told of the hard case which covers the soft or germ
part of the seed, and its seed-leaf food. This case does not melt up
in the bird’s crop or gizzard, as the soft food does. So when it falls to
the ground the germ is safe, and can sprout and grow.
Birds carry seeds in this way from land to land, as well as from field
to field. They fly over the sea and carry seeds to lonely islands,
which, but for the birds, might be barren.
So by means of its insect partners, the plant’s seed germs grow, and
perfect seeds. By means of the bird partners, the seeds are carried
from place to place. Thus many plants grow, and men are clothed,
and warmed, and fed.

FOOTNOTES:
[9] See Nature Reader, No. 2, Lessons on Ants.
[10] No. 1, Lesson 18.
 LESSON XI.
AIR, WATER, AND SAND PLANTS.
Most of the plants which you see about you grow in earth or soil. You
have heard your father say that the grass in some fields was scanty
because the soil was poor. You have been told that wheat and corn
would not grow in some other field, because the soil was not rich
enough.
You understand that. The plant needs good soil, made up of many
kinds of matter. These minerals are the plant’s food. Perhaps you
have helped your mother bring rich earth from the forest, to put
about her plants.
But beside these plants growing in good earth in the usual way, there
are plants which choose quite different places in which to grow.
There are air-plants, water-plants, sand-plants. Have you seen all
these kinds of plants?
You have, no doubt, seen plants growing in very marshy, wet places,
as the rush, the iris, and the St. John’s-wort. Then, too, you have
seen plants growing right in the water, as the water-lilies, yellow and
white; the little green duck-weed; and the water crow-foot.
If you have been to the sea-shore, you have seen green, rich-looking
plants, growing in a bank of dry sand. In the West and South, you
may find fine plants growing in what seem to be drifts, or plains of
clear sand.
Air-plants are less common. Let us look at them first. There are
some plants which grow upon other plants and yet draw no food
from the plant on which they grow. Such plants put forth roots,
leaves, stems, blossoms, but all their food is drawn from the air.
I hope you may go and see some hot-house where orchids are kept.
You will see there splendid plants growing on a dead branch, or