Reading Owen Barfield explain poetry was a pretty heavy task. I’ll have to return to it sometime and put more sweat into it. Sometimes what you really need to explain something is a metaphor. Even if the thing your explaining IS metaphor!
Stories, in having this [subversive belief changing] effect, function as complex metaphors.
Metaphor consists in bringing two sets of ideas close together, close enough for a spark to jump, but not too close, so that the spark, in jumping, illuminates for a moment the whole area around, changing perceptions as it does so.
Even so, the subversive story comes close enough to the story already believed by the hearer for a spark to jump between them; and nothing will ever be quite the same again.
-N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, p.40 (Footnotes say the metaphor illustration comes from Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor)
