WENDELL BERRY’S 'THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS'
As a poet, I’ve always subscribed to an art-for-art’s sake philosophy. In my senior year of high school, I read that famous conclusion of Archibald Macleish’s “Ars Poetica”—“ “A poem should not mean/ But be”—and became hooked on the notion that a work of literary art stood for nothing other than itself.
Any biographical, political, psychological, or personal meaning that readers might attribute to the poem was fine, but it was beside the point. For the poet, the point was—is—to stick to the job of making the poem. Rather than expressing her inner feelings or sending a message to the powers that be, the poet’s only focus should be to achieve a living, breathing work in language that, with luck, might stand the test of time. Pardon the prosodic pun, but a poem should be built to stand on its own two feet.
There are many fine poems, however, that, besides merely being, serve what I’d like to call a useful purpose for people. How many readers have at least started on the road to becoming stronger, more independent people at least partly as a result of reading Whitman or Dickinson or Baraka, for instance? Or, perhaps in a troubled mood, achieved an at least momentary sense of peace after reading George Herbert’s “Prayer (1)” ?
It’s in the latter sense that I’ve lately been experiencing Wendell Berry’s well-known poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” soul-stirringly read here by the poet. It’s a beautiful object, rich in music and imagery, a credit to its creator (and, if you like, The Creator). But it’s precisely because of Berry’s art that the poem can be of use to us in these worrisome times, when we’re more prone than ever to experiencing F.Scott Fitzgerald’s three o’clock in the morning of the soul. Berry’s poem opens with such night-thoughts:
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
Where do you go for comfort when you wake up with growing despair in the middle of the night? In moments of crisis, I’ve found solace in reading the Psalms, where I hear the voice of someone who lived thousands of years ago (created, perhaps, by my own namesake) who cried out very much in the way that I’ve felt myself silently crying out in those moments. The sense of connection I’ve felt with that voice has often settled me.
A contemporary psalm itself, Berry’s poem aligns itself with the music of the Psalms. In “I go and lie down” and “I come into the presence of still water,” you can hear the 23rd psalm: “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.” Beyond its soothing music, though, the poem’s structure enacts a kind of solution to the despair that’s voiced in the first three lines. What can you actually do when you awaken in the middle of the night with an abyss yawning before you?
The poet shows you. He goes down to the next line and, his speaker says,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
There is a physical sense of descent to a stable, natural, and sacred place. Yes, the poem is beautiful. But it’s also profoundly useful.
Photo Credit: "Wendell Berry" by On Being is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0