In 1963, Howard Nemerov first wrote to Owen Barfield, the man responsible for the term objective idealism, in praise of Barfield's Poetic Diction. His expression of gratitude for the book launched a correspondence that lasted for more than twenty years, punctuated by Barfield's frequent observations that Nemerov's poetry illustrated one or another principle of Barfield's philosophy and by Nemerov's liberal deliveries of drafts of poems and essays that he considered consistent with Barfield's concepts. In "The Makers," Nemerov's analogy for writing a poem is weaving a tapestry. With this analogy in mind, Owen Barfield's ideas, particularly as expressed in Poetic Diction, History in English Words, Worlds Apart, and Saving the Appearances, may be viewed as the threads that significantly enhance and clarify the rich texture and pattern of Nemerov's poetry.

Barfield and Nemerov met each other in 1964, when Barfield came to the United States to serve as a visiting professor at Drew University. In December 1967 Barfield wrote to Nemerov to describe the impact that "The Blue Swallows" had had on his philosophy and referred to Nemerov as his "ambassador at the court of contemporary poetry, with which my relations are somewhat strained." Nemerov's introduction to Barfield's 1968 lecture at Brandeis (where Nemerov was serving as a visiting professor) describes Barfield's philosophy as primarily concerned with "the nature of thought itself and how thought and perception are alike conditioned by language," which also serves as an apt description of Nemerov's poetry. Nemerov refers in the same text to one of Barfield's central ideas—the evolution of consciousness. For both Barfield and Nemerov, positivism, which advocates strict adherence to the testimony of experience and observation to the exclusion of the imagination, is objectionable primarily because it does not account for an evolution of consciousness that corresponds to the physical evolution described by Darwin and others.

Barfield contends, "In the evolution of etymology itself is echoed the evolution of consciousness as it shifted from original participation—'true meaning' to separation—'accurate account.'"[1] A word like grammar, for example, was once replete with magical connotations but now refers merely to observable structures in language. Nemerov's insistence on maintaining the many connotations of even a single word indicates that he also finds that restoring "true meaning" to language provides the means for ultimately restoring it to life. Thus, both Barfield and Nemerov identify language as the agent of reality.

Furthermore, Barfield calls for the scientific validation both of the subjective side of experience and of so-called secondary qualities, which are necessary for the imaginative grasp of the process of the evolution of consciousness. While science would appear to be a stronghold of objective, detached thinking, subjectivity nonetheless plays a fundamental role; the scientist relies on imaginative insight and a creative response to empirical data. Positivism, which Barfield defines as "the philosophical statement of the position that there is an unbridgeable gulf between mental experience or the mental world on the one hand and the objective world, the outside world of nature on the other," obviously denies the role of subjectivity in science.

Barfield's term RUP, "residue of unresolved positivism," summarizes what he believes to be the chief deterrent to attaining a holistic view of reality—not only for scientists, but for any post-Enlightenment thinker. To abandon positivism's one-sided, materialist perception of reality, one must grasp the concept of polarity, in which, "the more opposition there is, the greater the unity." Barfield refers to this philosophy as "objective idealism," which asserts that reality consists in the polarity between "the subjectivity of the individual mind and the objective world which it perceives."[2]

Shirley Sugerman, in her introduction to a collection of essays on Barfield entitled The Evolution of Consciousness, explains the concept of polarity in greater detail:

According to Barfield, consciousness and objective being are obverse and reverse sides of the same coin: there is a "unity of intelligence and nature"—a unity that recognizes, however, the independent, although interdependent, existence of each. . . . The nature of this interdependent relationship is that of a polarity of contraries. . . .the two poles "exist by virtue of each other as well as at each other's expense." It is on the dynamic interdependence of polar opposites that the evolution of consciousness depends.[3]

The interdependence of self and the world is perhaps best expressed in Coleridge's dictum: "grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which fends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity and I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you." Barfield's concept of "collective representations" in fact echoes Coleridge's language here. In Saving the Appearances, Barfield explains that a rainbow, for example, is a "collective," or shared, representation—the product of sun, rain, and one's own vision. The viewers of the rainbow contribute all that is in the representation that is not merely sensory.

This interdependence is demonstrated in a poem included in Nemerov's last complete collection of poetry. War Stories, entitled "Landscape with Self-Portrait."

A shading porch, that's open to the west

Whence the weather comes, and giving on a lawn

Won from the meadow where the hay's been baled

In cubes like building blocks of dusty gold,

And further down, through trees, the streaming creek

With three still pools by passagework

Of rapids and rills in fretted rhythms linked;

And on the porch the life-defeated self

And reciprocating engine of reverie

Translating to time the back and forth of Space,

The foot's escapement measuring the mind

In memories while the whole antic machine

Processes across the floor and towards the edge

And has to be hitched back from time to time;

And there to watch the tarnished silver cloud

Advancing up the valley on a wind

That shudders the leaves and turns them silverside

While shadows sweep over the stubble and grass,

And sudden the heavy silver of the first

Raindrops blown slanting in and summer cold

And turning continuous in silver strings;

And after that, the clarified serene

Of the little of daylight that remains to make

Distinct the details of the fading sight:

The laddered blue on blue of the bluejay's tail,

The sweeping swallows low above the swale

Among the insect victims as they rise

To be picked off, and peace is satisfied.

The poem's title, by incorporating two ostensibly antithetical modes of painting, represents the polar relation between self and the world. Many of Nemerov's poems rely on the terms and techniques of painting, which Nemerov refers to as "speaking the silence," the means by which one can convey that essence which is beyond the power of language.

Nemerov often alludes to paintings and drawings by Brueghel, Magritte, Escher, Klee, not only as a means for analogizing the poet's role but also to express that the consciousness revealed through art has its corollary in nature. Thus, this poem ostensibly concerned with painting, the product of human consciousness, is also a poem about nature, which in the modern world is considered to be outside consciousness. Throughout his career, Nemerov was preoccupied with rendering nature sensitively and precisely; especially in The Next Room of the Dream and The Blue Swallows, written during his stay in Vermont, poems such as 'A Spell before Winter" and "Firelight in Sunlight" reveal an attentiveness to the fine details of the landscape. Helen Vendler wrote in her review of War Stories that Nemerov is "more aware of the turning of the seasons than any other poet except Ammons."[4]

Nemerov was interested in nature not merely for its own sake, but also as a means of depicting the relation between nature and human nature. Julia Bartholomay observes that in Nemerov's poetry "the naturalistic description of the changing stream augments the metaphysical sense of the poem; nature's season and the season of the heart are one."[5]

The descriptions in "Landscape with Self-Portrait," though replete with gnats and swallows and autumnal gold reminiscent of Frost and Keats, are controlled by a voice that is clearly Nemerov's. Immediately after publishing his first two books of poetry, Nemerov found himself compared with everyone from T. S. Eliot to Wallace Stevens to Gerard Manley Hopkins. While these poets were all important to Nemerov at one time or another, he quickly developed the ability to incorporate essential elements from other poets without muting his own distinctive voice.

The "fading sight" that is associated with the aging process is rendered through details that simultaneously describe the human response to cold and storm and night. Our growing awareness of mortality, which Nemerov often strove to capture in poetry, reminds us that our seeming autonomy is ultimately a delusion and that we are inextricably bound to nature and to being. Less than two months after Nemerov's death of cancer, Louis D. Rubin, Jr. wrote in a tribute to Nemerov for the Sewanee Review:

He had figured out, a long time back, long before any illness, that because he was going to die, everything he or anyone else could say or think or do was to that extent a compromised, crucially limited activity, that was of qualified significance—and that if he was going to write anything really meaningful about human experience he had to start with that assumption. So that was usually what his poems were about; beyond that point we cannot know anything.[6]

The poem's many references to gold and silver—tarnished silver clouds and leaves turned "silverside"—recall "Runes," in which the sunflowers that spend the tarnished silver of their change are the metaphor for the way in which our lives' worth and work are eventually spent in dying. The "lawn won from the meadow" represents the human effort to attain at least a temporary victory over nature and is simultaneously a defense of Nemerov's reliance on traditional meter in his poetry; the poem is in meticulously crafted blank verse, with seven-line rhyme-royal stanzas and many conventional poetic techniques—alliteration, assonance, personification—that generate order from the random world that he describes. Nemerov frequently suggests in his poetry that there is an underlying pattern in nature that may be discerned by the patient few, just as Nemerov discerns in the streaming creek's apparently random flow "a passagework of rapids and rills in fretted rhythms linked."

His decision to focus on this pattern resembles that of Richard Wilbur, who forwent writing war poetry in the midst of World War II to describe Caserta Garden, not because he was incapable of facing the painful facts of the war, but because he sensed the need to impose order on the chaotic backdrop or wartime Europe. Wilbur considered "how beauties will grow richer walled about," referring both to his preference for the garden over unruly nature and also to his preference for traditional rhyme and meter in poetry.

Within the four stanzas of Nemerov's poem there is an orderly progression—from sunset to twilight, from porch to self to landscape, from the harvest to the death of vegetation, from descent to ascent—complemented by the regular rhythm of the rocking chair and of the poem itself. Swallows are noted for their swift, graceful flight and for the extent and regularity of their migrations. In "The Blue Swallows," the swallows hover above the self, but in "Landscape with Self-Portrait" they hover above death and decay.

Stanza 2 describes a person rocking on a porch who must continually push back the rocking chair upon reaching the porch's edge, yet Nemerov deliberately obscures the stanza's subject by employing terms from mechanics. Nemerov's ongoing interest in etymology is evident here, as well as his reliance on the machine as a metaphor for a worldview that denies the value of imagination. The "foot's escapement measuring the mind" refers to the person rocking back and forth on the porch, conjuring memories in the process of rocking; yet the archaic meaning of escapement is "a way of escape, outlet," suggesting that the act of rocking is also the means for averting painful truths. A "reciprocating engine" is Nemerov's technical term for the brain. Although "precess" means "precede," it is also the mechanical term for the motion of the rotation axis of a rigid body— in this case, of the rocking chair.

While the second stanza's language is cacophonous and its syntax disturbingly irregular, the following stanzas return to the continuity and graceful alliteration of the first stanza. Only when Nemerov steps away from the limited perspective of the "self" on the porch to the broader view of the landscape does his portrait begin to harmonize—as if to suggest that only when the self is placed in the larger context of nature can life acquire meaning. Nemerov's "Landscape with Self-Portrait" thus may be regarded as the poetic expression of Barfield's concept of polarity.