Poetry Month: Wendell Berry

It's funny that I found and posted the "poem in your pocket" idea, as I've been contemplating trying to do some other posts here in honor of National Poetry Month.

What I've decided to do is to share a few of my very favorite poems -- the ones that I've read and go back to reading time and again, because they touch me deeply.

I thought I'd start today with Wendell Berry's The Peace of Wild Things. You can find this poem many places online, including at the Poetry Foundation.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.


Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things" from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998.

I love this poem. I keep a copy of it on the side of my refrigerator, near enough so I can look up and read it while I'm chopping vegetables or stirring up batter.

Almost every spare line of this poem speaks to me. I think because it starts with an emotion that is so familiar to all of us, no matter how comfortable and joy-filled our lives are on so many levels. We all know the taste of despair: despair over our own ongoing daily brokenness and failures, even when we've been grasped and saved by grace, and despair over the large-scale fallenness and sufferings of the world. And we've all certainly had nights we can't sleep, when anxiety seems to well up out of the void and keeps us wide-eyed and fully awake.

I remember being moved by the line in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be even before I had children, but how much more achingly real that felt after becoming a mother. Especially in that first year or two of your child's life, when on the wakeful nights you still creep to their rooms in awe and gratitude over the magnitude of the gift you've been given, and yet realize how fragile (as well as amazing) that little life still feels. The nights you watch them breathe (partly to assure yourself they're still breathing) and see the way they fling their limbs in complete abandon. They look so vulnerable with their cheeks creased by sleep and their touseled, sweaty hair, and sometimes you can't help but wonder about the future -- your's but especially their's.

As beautiful as this poem is in its opening lines, I think it turns smoothly, like a bird settling into an air current after take-off, and strokes powerfully forward with the movement of the speaker from inside to outside. He goes to lie down outdoors, to move into the peace of wild things/who do not tax their lives with forethought/of grief. What's powerful here, what settles with weight into my throat as I read it, is that implicit contrast. The speaker is awake, is alive with worry, with hope, with wonderings and fears and questions, projecting into an unknown future, while all around him are parts of creation that can't do that, that don't do that, that simply are. They exist, they live fully in the present, they do what birds and water and stars are supposed to do by flying and lapping and shining, and that is their life and their praise. They have no forethought of grief. But we do. And that's painful, a hugely painful part of being human...and yet, even as I settle with the speaker into the temporary and welcome relief of the peace of wild things, I don't think I would give up the forethought of grief permanently if I could. If we have forethought of grief, we also have anticipation, forethought of joy. And the sweet, blessed relief of seeing grief abate or suffering averted, or -- maybe even more deeply -- knowing the moments of grace and peace right in the midst of suffering, as we share in it and as God shares in it with us.

The poet knows the peace of wild things is temporary too. He feels the day-blind stars waiting with their light above him...stars that constantly shine but whose light is hidden to us during daylight. But he takes comfort, I think, that the stars are there, and comfort too in anticipating that though his perspective means he will lose them with morning light, he also knows (with human forethought) that he will find them again with the coming of night. And that there are some sorts of light you can only fully appreciate and experience as they're set out against the dark.

So he rests in the grace of the world....for a time...knowing it's a temporary respite, and knowing that the sense of freedom it brings is also temporary. Yet necessary. We all need these moments of stillness and beauty and grace, where we move beyond ourselves and feel the blessings of God on the whole, beautiful earth. The grace of the world, glimpsed in pockets, in moments, is wonderful and refreshing. It can strengthen us for the journey. But it's just a tiny taste of the fountain of grace, and of the longer, more lasting rest into which we're going to be called one day, when our forethought of grief, and even grief itself, at last slips away, death swallowed up in life.

Wendell Berry has written so many beautiful poems, including others I go back to, but this one is the one I return to most. Its theme here reminds me a good bit of some of the poems by Mary Oliver in her book House of Light.