This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

by Wendell Berry

They would be most favorably heard if read aloud into a kind of quietness that is not afforded by any public place.

The poems are about moments when heart and mind are open and aware.

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.

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 condition of the people is indistinguishable ultimately from the condition of the land. Work that destroys the land, diminishing its ability to support life, is a great evil for which sooner or later the punishment is homelessness, hunger, and thirst. For some, the context of this thinking has shifted from religion to science, but the understanding of the land as a conditional gift has not changed.

Nature of course includes damage as a part of her wholeness. Her creatures live only by the deaths of other creatures. Wind, flood, and fire are as much her means of world-making as birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay. She destroys and she heals. Her ways are cyclic, but she is absolutely original. She never exactly repeats herself, and this is the source equally of our grief and our delight. But Nature’s damages are followed by her healings, though not necessarily on a human schedule or in human time. The “creative destruction” of industrialism, by contrast, implies no repayment of what we have taken, no healing, but is in effect a repudiation of our membership in the land-community.

The fundamental conflict of our time is that between the creaturely life of Nature’s world and the increasingly mechanical life of modern humans.

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

This quantitative endlessness, including also the idea of endless economic “growth,” is clearly different from the inexhaustibility of Nature on her terms, and of goodness, beauty, and truth on ours. To rest, we must accept Nature’s limits and our own. When we come to our limit, we must be still.

the idea of sabbath rest, consciously understood and accepted, becomes an unexcusing standard by which to judge our history, our lives, and our work.

That one is sometimes able, among the disturbances of the present world, to wander into some good and beautiful whereabouts of the woods, grow quiet, and come to rest is a gift, a wonder, and a kind of grace.

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, disorderly, extravagant, and out of control. They are our natural teachers, and we have learned too little from them.

in any work of land use, the local ecosystem must be the model and measure.

Imposter! do not charge most innocent Nature, As if she would her children should be riotous With her abundance. She, good cateress, Means her provision only to the good, That live according to her sober laws, And holy dictate of spare Temperance. JOHN MILTON, Comus

I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle. Then what is afraid of me comes and lives a while in my sight. What it fears in me leaves me, and the fear of me leaves it. It sings, and I hear its song. Then what I am afraid of comes. I live for a while in its sight. What I fear in it leaves it, and the fear of it leaves me. It sings, and I hear its song. After days of labor, mute in my consternations, I hear my song at last, and I sing it. As we sing, the day turns, the trees move.

Whatever is foreseen in joy Must be lived out from day to day, Vision held open in the dark By our ten thousand days of work. Harvest will fill the barn; for that The hand must ache, the face must sweat. And yet no leaf or grain is filled By work of ours; the field is tilled And left to grace. That we may reap, Great work is done while we’re asleep. When we work well, a Sabbath mood Rests on our day, and finds it good.

I went away only a few hundred steps up the hill, and turned and started home. And then I saw the pasture green under the trees, the open hillside, the little ponds, our house, cistern, woodshed, and barn, the river bending in its valley, our garden new-planted beside it. All around, the woods that had been stark in the harsh air of March, had turned soft with new leaves. Birdsong had returned to the branches: the stream sang in the fold of the hill. In its time and its patience beauty had come upon us, greater than I had imagined.

Hate has no world. The people of hate must try to possess the world of love, for it is the only world; it is Heaven and Earth. But as lonely, eager hate possesses it, it disappears; it never did exist, and hate must seek another world that love has made.

They sit together on the porch, the dark Almost fallen, the house behind them dark. Their supper done with, they have washed and dried The dishes—only two plates now, two glasses, Two knives, two forks, two spoons—small work for two. She sits with her hands folded in her lap, At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak. And when they speak at last it is to say What each one knows the other knows. They have One mind between them, now, that finally For all its knowing will not exactly know Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.

Raking hay on a rough slope, when I was about sixteen, I drove to the ridgetop and saw in a neighbor’s field on the other side a pond in a swale, and around it the whole field filled with chicory in bloom, blue as the sky reflected in the pond— bluer even, and somehow lighter, though they belonged to gravity. They were the morning’s blossoms and would not last. But I go back now in my mind to when I drew the long windrow to the top of the rise, and I see the blue-flowered field, holding in its center the sky-reflecting pond. It seems, as then, another world in this world, such as a pilgrim might travel days and years to find, and find at last on the morning of his return by his mere being at home awake—a moment seen, forever known.

AMISH ECONOMY We live by mercy if we live. To that we have no fit reply But working well and giving thanks, Loving God, loving one another, To keep Creation’s neighborhood. And my friend David Kline told me, “It falls strangely on Amish ears, This talk of how you find yourself. We Amish, after all, don’t try To find ourselves. We try to lose Ourselves”—and thus are lost within The found world of sunlight and rain Where fields are green and then are ripe, And the people eat together by The charity of God, who is kind Even to those who give no thanks. In morning light, men in dark clothes Go out among the beasts and fields. Lest the community be lost, Each day they must work out the bond Between goods and their price: the garden Weeded by sweat is flowerbright; The wheat shocked in shorn fields, clover Is growing where wheat grew; the crib Is golden with the gathered corn,

While in the world of the found selves, Lost to the sunlit, rainy world, The motor-driven cannot stop. This is the world where value is Abstract, and preys on things, and things Are changed to thoughts that have a price. Cost + greed – fear = price: Maury Telleen thus laid it out. The need to balance greed and fear Affords no stopping place, no rest, And need increases as we fail. But now, in summer dusk, a man Whose hair and beard curl like spring ferns Sits under the yard trees, at rest, His smallest daughter on his lap. This is because he rose at dawn, Cared for his own, helped his neighbors, Worked much, spent little, kept his peace.

I know that I have life only insofar as I have love. I have no love except it come from Thee. Help me, please, to carry this candle against the wind.