MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR BARNARD TAYLOR The First Baptist Church Lewisburg, PA May 5, 2007 I hope I'm speaking for everyone who knew, admired and loved Barney. Versatile painter, master printer, designer and publisher of fine books, Barnard Taylor made a valuable contribution to the arts, letters and beauty of the world. Especially significant is that he substantially helped to keep alive the art of bookmaking. The compulsion that energized him was to make the printed book worthy of the text that it presented and preserved. The garage behind his home on South Third Street in Lewisburg became a studio-print shop where fine books were produced. At the same time, it served as a classroom in which Barney patiently and skillfully taught the designing, illustrating and printing of fine books to a generation of apprentices. They admired, valued and loved him. An expression of the devotion of many of them is their presence in this auditorium today. In the more than thirty volumes of poetry, fiction and letters that Barney produced, giving himself to the making, and in what he passed on to his apprentices, he endures, lives on. For half a century Barney was my friend. We had morning coffee together five days a week, at Guy Payne's, the Bison and the Seventh Street Cafe on the Bucknell campus, then in Cafe Latte. One gentlewoman who lived on South Third Street once told me she set her clocks by our appearance on her sidewalk at five minutes before ten weekday -1-
-2- mornings. In earlier days Barney was my tennis partner, quick and dependable at the net. He was endowed with good hands. It seems appropriate to celebrate Barney's gift to us and the larger world, and to try to come to terms with his absence by way of poetry. Physically Barney was a wonder. With his perpetually boyish face, trim figure and sprightly carriage, he appeared to be a man of fifty when he was eighty. Eternal youth seemed to be his. His artistry never lost its quality as he aged. Modest as he was, it never would have occurred to Barney that he was a remarkable human specimen. In the first stanza of this short poem by William Wordsworth, the speaker confesses he was led to believe the subject of the elegy was ageless. In the second stanza he comes to terns with the fact of her death. You'll hear the parallel with Barney. [Wordsworth's "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal"] One of the most moving and beautiful poems written by an American poet is Walt Whitman's elegy for Abraham Lincoln, who had led the nation through a bloody civil war. I think of Barney's valor and courage as he endured a cruel disease, without a complaint or a whimper. In these lines from Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," the poet accepts, indeed embraces death as he listens to the haunting song of the hermit thrush. [Whitman's lines] In his final days Barney seemed to linger in the divide between life and death. These are some lines from a poem
-3- about the need I felt to visit him. Without nursing the illusion that voice, touch, breath, mere sense of being bring him comfort. I spend time with him who's out of time, but not yet timeless, for my own sake. Beyond suffering, not yet in quietude, he has no need for solace. To be and not to be, that is his mystery. If on those visits I found the Barney I'd once known missing, afterward I was able to find him. [Passage of a Painter] Finally, two lines about our dealing with our loss. As the streams of our grief run dry, we draw from deep wells of wonder.
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness, To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still. And the singer so shy to the rest receiv'd me, The grey-brown bird I know receiv'd us comrades three, And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love. From the deep secluded recesses, From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still, Came the carol of the bird. And the charm of the carol rapt me, As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night, And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird. Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later delicate death. Prais'd be the fathomless universe, For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious, And for love, sweet love-but praise! praise! praise! For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death. Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet, Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all, I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.
John Wheatcmft The Gundy Farm 350 River Rd. Lewisburg, PA 17837 i Missing Him PASSAGE OF A PAINTER I've come to visit him in Assisted Living. Beyond assistance, he isn't here. Concealed in the false ceiling above the bed, someone is jerking invisible strings hooked on fingers and toes. When I take a hand to bestow the peace of rest, it wants my hand to dance. I whisper his name, then mine into a porcelain ear. For Barnard Taylor How futile to whisk away the fly, persistent as a spy plane that's on to something, buzzing eyes that never blink.