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The fundamental conflict of our time is that between the creaturely life of Nature’s world and the increasingly mechanical life of modern humans. Among the poets of the twentieth century nobody was more aware of this contradiction than T. S. Eliot, who believed that “religion . . . implies a life in conformity to nature. It may be observed that the natural life and the supernatural life have a conformity to each other which neither has with the mechanistic life . . .” (Christianity and Culture, 48).
All rest partakes, consciously or not, of the sabbath. But the idea of sabbath rest, consciously understood and accepted, becomes an unexcusing standard by which to judge our history, our lives, and our work. And so the unintended thought on a Sunday walk, the thought invoked by the sabbath theme, does not dependably lead to rest. By disfigurements that our time imposes upon consciousness, by scars of bad history that mark the land, by sounds of machinery dominating the air, the mind may be returned to themes of loss, estrangement, and sorrow. That one is sometimes able, among the disturbances
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As for “wild,” I now think the word is misused. The longer I have lived and worked here among the noncommercial creatures of the woods and fields, the less I have been able to conceive of them as “wild.” They plainly are going about their own domestic lives, finding or making shelter, gathering food, minding their health, raising their young, always well-adapted to their places. They are far better at domesticity than we industrial humans are. It became clear to me also that they think of us as wild, and that they are right. We are the ones who are undomesticated, barbarous, unrestrained,
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Past life Lives in the living. Resurrection Is in the way each maple leaf Commemorates its kind, by connection Outreaching understanding.
What if, in the high, restful sanctuary That keeps the memory of Paradise, We’re followed by the drone of history And greed’s poisonous fumes still burn our eyes? Disharmony recalls us to our work. From Heavenly work of light and wind and leaf We must turn back into the peopled dark Of our unraveling century, the grief Of waste, the agony of haste and noise. It is a hard return from Sabbath rest To lifework of the fields, yet we rejoice, Returning, less condemned in being blessed By vision of what human work can make: A harmony between forest and field, The world as it was given for love’s
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Enclosing the field within bounds sets it apart from the boundless of which it was, and is, a part, and places it within care. The bounds of the field bind the mind to it. A bride adorned, the field now wears the green veil of a season’s abounding. Open the gate! Open it wide, that time and hunger may come in. X
The frog with lichened back and golden thigh Sits still, almost invisible On leafed and lichened stem, Invisibility Its sign of being at home There in its given place, and well. The warbler with its quivering striped throat Would live almost beyond my sight, Almost beyond belief, But for its double note— Among high leaves a leaf, At ease, at home in air and light. And I, through woods and fields, through fallen days, Am passing to where I belong: At home, at ease, and well, In Sabbaths of this place Almost invisible, Toward which I go from song to song.
Setting aside his claim On all things fallen in his plight, His mind may move with leaves, Wind-shaken, in and out of light, And live as the light lives, And live as the Creation sings In covert, two clear notes, And waits;
The ones Who are to come are on their way, And though we stand in mortal good Among our dead, we turn in doom In joy to welcome them, stirred by That Ghost who stirs in seed and tomb, Who brings the stones to parenthood.
the thought of you goes with me; my mind reaches toward yours across the distance and through time. No mortal mind’s complete within itself, but minds must speak and answer,
Wrong was easy; gravity helped it. Right is difficult and long. In choosing what is difficult we are free, the mind too making its little flight out from the shadow into the clear in time between work and sleep. There are two healings: nature’s, and ours and nature’s. Nature’s will come in spite of us, after us, over the graves of its wasters, as it comes to the forsaken fields. The healing that is ours and nature’s will come if we are willing, if we are patient, if we know the way, if we will do the work.
Blessing and blessed in this result Of times not blessed, now he has risen. He walks in quiet beyond division In surcease of his own tumult.
Now fallen, they are given To labor and distress. These times we know much evil, little good To steady us in faith And comfort when our losses press Hard on us, and we choose, In panic or despair or both, To keep what we will lose. For we are fallen like the trees, our peace Broken, and so we must Love where we cannot trust, Trust where we cannot know, And must await the wayward-coming grace That joins living and dead, Taking us where we would not go— Into the boundless dark.
The dark Again has prayed the light to come Down into it, to animate And move it in its heaviness.
the last vacationers gone back to the life that drives away from home.
