At a recent Music of Midwinter concert by Windborne, a member of the group recited the Wendell Berry poem The Peace of Wild Things.

With “uncommon tenderness and clarity of vision” Berry’s title poem of his 1968 collection The Peace of Wild Things was . . .

“. . . composed under a thick cultural cloudscape of despair—at the peak of the Cold War and the Vietnam War, after the successive assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Dr. King, in the wake of Silent Spring and its disquieting wakeup call for our broken relationship with nature.”

The Marginalia

Windborne chose the poem as part of a segment on darkness and light. It invites us “to stop, to think, to see the world around us, and to savor what is good.” As the publishers note reminds us, “here are consoling verses of hope and of healing” in a short, simple meditation.

As Kate Kellaway wrote in a review of the new edition of the book that gets its title from this poem, “his is poetry to lower blood pressure, to induce calm.”

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The Peace of Wild Things

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.

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This “Poetry Film” from the On Being series features an animated interpretation and the poet reading his own work.

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There are many musical adaptations of the Wendell Berry text. Jake Runestad won the 2014 YNYC Composer Competition with this haunting setting.

Sean Ivory has a composition using this text with “expertly crafted vocal lines, an artistic and supportive piano accompaniment, and a stunning viola part.” It was written with more advanced treble choirs in mind and is so very moving.

Joan Szymko is “a composer and choral conductor who has led choirs in the Pacific Northwest for over 25 years, and has a significant body of choral work, especially prolific in literature for women’s voices.” This particular work was written in 2006 and is “dedicated to the welfare of all beings.”

Take some time during this season to rest in the grace of the world.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash