For Poetry Month, an Appreciation of Wendell Berry

NHBF board member and editor Rebecca Briccetti shares her appreciation for Wendell Berry’s poem “On the Peace of Wild Things.”

Sitting with Berry’s poem has never failed to calm the bolting of my heart, no matter how wracking my worry, or profound my grief. It gives me the space to pause, and reset my equilibrium, comforted by the reminder that my physical self is inseparable from Nature writ large. Breathing in, breathing out. Breathing in, breathing out.

To lie down where the wood drake rests is to “come into the presence of still water.” Here is the thread of timelessness (reassurance itself!) that runs through the poem: the psalmic references–still water, grace, stars waiting for their light–and yet again, the unfailing stars, seen and unseen.

Coming into the peace of wild things, we enter a sanctuary, cradling yet vast. The narrator feels the presence of the all-but-invisible stars, their imperturbable waiting an assurance. In describing that unseen celestial presence, Berry shows us how much we share with everything from herons to planets; we are of a piece with all that is.

From “The Peace of Wild Things,” 2016:

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

—Rebecca Briccetti