There are times I suddenly have the urge to leave my urban setting and go in the woods, to the beach or outside anywhere I can’t hear the cars driving on pavement.
It’s when my mind ticks over and becomes mentally overwhelmed, and I just need the solace of nature. And I need to experience it alone.
So when I first read Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things,” it deeply resonated with me.
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.
The poem captures a need to be with nature. However, I don’t think it has to be actual wilderness. I think of this poem as speaking to an away-ness. While I feel the urge to go lie down where wood drake rests, not everyone does.
“When despair for the world grows in me” — yet the change that happens is physical. The narrator goes somewhere and the perspective leaves the self and pivots to something beautiful–nature.
While I personally like to take this poem literal because of my own experience, I think someone can also take away the idea that it’s about changing your perspective and focus off of the, let’s say, “ugliness inside” to the “beautiful outside.”
I recommend reading The Peace of Wild Things: And Other Poems by Wendell Berry and The Deleted World by Tomas Tranströmer.
Memoir of a Writer 
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. – Such beautiful and deep words. Love them.
For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.- super ending to a great poem.
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That’s a nice poem.
Henry David Thoreau would approve.
Animals don’t think of “what’s next?” They only consider “what’s now?”
Thanks for this.
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Very lovely post. Thanks for making me aware of Wendell Berry. Reading the poem created a sense of peace within me.
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Maybe the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water of the mind, which puts the beautiful inside. Then our happiness depends on the quality of our thoughts, as Aurelius says.
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That’s a good way to look at it. I do believe the inner (should be) what’s dependent on happiness, but when in turmoil inside the natural world is like a balm to the soul.
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