This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

by Wendell Berry

In such places, on the best of these sabbath days, I experience a lovely freedom from expectations—other people’s and also my own. I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration. The poems come incidentally or they do not come at all. If the Muse leaves me alone, I leave her alone. To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry.

We are to rest on the sabbath also, I have supposed, in order to understand that the providence or the productivity of the living world, the most essential work, continues while we rest. This work is entirely independent of our work, and is far more complex and wonderful than any work we have ever done or will ever do. It is more complex and wonderful than we will ever understand.

The idea of the sabbath gains in meaning as it is brought out-of-doors and into a place where nature’s principles of self-sustaining wholeness and health are still evident. In such a place – as never, for me, under a roof – the natural and the supernatural, the heavenly and the earthly, the soul and the body, the wondrous and the ordinary, all appear to occur together in the one fabric of creation. All stand both upon the earth and upon the fundamental miracle that where once was nothing now we have these creatures in this place on this day. In such a place one might expectably come to rest, with trust renewed in the creation’s power to exist and to continue.

The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness .

He is a tree of a sort, rooted in the dark, aspiring to the light, dependent on both.

The mind that comes to rest is tended In ways that it cannot intend: Is borne, preserved, and comprehended By what it cannot comprehend. Your Sabbath, Lord, thus keeps us by Your will, not ours. And it is fit Our only choice should be to die Into that rest, or out of it.

To sit and look at light-filled leaves May let us see, or seem to see, Far backward as through clearer eyes To what unsighted hope believes: The blessed conviviality That sang Creation’s seventh sunrise, Time when the Maker’s radiant sight Made radiant every thing He saw, And every thing He saw was filled With perfect joy and life and light. His perfect pleasure was sole law; No pleasure had become self-willed. For all His creatures were His pleasures And their whole pleasure was to be What He made them; they sought no gain Or growth beyond their proper measures, Nor longed for change or novelty. The only new thing could be pain.