The Sabbath Poems of Wendell Berry

A man walks from field into forest. It is Sunday, the Sabbath, and he has left his tasks to “lie in their places where (he) left them, asleep like cattle.”

He comes to the woods, where light becomes leaves. He reads the scars of eroded fields now overgrown. Through no doing of man, birdsong fills the air. He comes to find rest, yes, but in his workingman’s rest he seeks something larger, something that might offer an encompassing redemption.

The man is Wendell Berry: poet, mad farmer, and critic of America’s insatiable appetites and so-called progress. His Sabbath poems, gathered in “This Day” (1979-2013) and “Another Day” (2013-2023), represent a poet-farmer’s most intimate encounter with self and place.

These are the poems I turned to Aug. 31 when I heard Berry had died at the age of 92. They seek rest and hope — and don’t always find it, as they are nothing if not honest — while they trace a man walking into old age and a society continuing to race toward points of no return. Death and light suffuse them. His moods shift with the seasons. Is nothing pure? Is redemption forthcoming?

As a young man, in 1965, Berry left a cosmopolitan writer’s life to return to his ancestors’ farmland in Henry County, Kentucky. There he raised sheep and farmed with horses. His surroundings suffuse his earthy novels and poetry. His experience as a farmer gives authority to his biting cultural criticism.

Berry remains a talisman for grassroots America for the way his work paints a portrait of a rooted lifestyle that feels present, possible, imminent. A worry I have is that his writing will be reduced, like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, into one-liners. He argued his points with such pith that he is quotable as hell.

But these Sabbath poems are unlike his other poems, he warns us. They were never intended to be performed. They are not arguments. They derive from a tradition of silencing the human voice and surrendering

 to something larger. His background is Christian. His lifelong allergy to institutions pushes him into the woods more often than the pews on Sabbath.

“These poems were written in silence, in solitude, mainly out of doors,” he writes. “A reader will like them best, I think, who reads them in similar circumstances.”

The woods to him are the counterbalance to the fields he works so hard to tend. They are patient. They are full of song. They will one day swallow the paths he makes through them. The context they give his life and effort cannot be created by man:

The mind that comes to rest is tended

In ways that it cannot intend:

Is borne, preserved, and comprehended

By what it cannot comprehend.

Such an attitude sidesteps the top-down responsibility we are taught to feel toward nature. It reveals the bounds of our powers. Speaking of trees, he writes, “A man / is small before those who have stood so long.” Speaking of leaves and flowers, he writes, “The light made flesh and blood.”

He returns again and again to that alchemy upon which we depend: leaves from light. It is his best analogue for the unearned grace by which we live.

His words are elemental, almost biblical, a terrain of strength even when his heart is weak. The early poems remind me of the Psalms of the shepherd David. There is great struggle in them. His whole life and work hang in the balance.

And here is where he perhaps overidealizes the woods and nature’s powers. He yearns for an order that transcends. The thicket that grows on a badly eroded field — land lost to human use by greed or sloth — with its bloodroot flowers and dappled light, holds an innate tonic power to outlast and counterbalance the technological society’s slow slide into oblivion.

Or that is what he projects upon it in the early poems. They have structure and rhyme, evidence of a yearning for order. They are built on dualistic concepts: work and rest, worry and joy, cultivation and nature, dark and light. Yet half the time the rhymes are slant: noise with rejoice, home with bloom, place with peace.

And his concepts sometimes slant too. Hope pairs with Wrong: “The field is made by hand and eye, / By daily work, by hope outreaching wrong.”

Love pairs with grief: “Where love has equaled grief, who grieves?”

His treatment of darkness may be most compelling. To Berry, darkness is a relief, a canvas for thought, a place beyond the reach of machines. It is a strong indicator that you belong in a place if you feel comfortable there when it goes dark. Darkness is also where miracles occur: “The seed is in the ground. / Now we may rest in hope / While darkness does its work.”

These unexpected twists only grow as you watch his years accumulate. He retreats from projecting his faith through poetic structure, opting instead to capture moments of grief and insight, impure as they may be. These poems are quite different from the bulk of nature poetry, in which wilderness must be exactly as unpeopled and pure as industrial society is not. Berry’s home terrain is everywhere touched by man, marked with bones of labor and generations of family. His words are tangled up in human joy and pain.

Continue with him, slowly, as friends die and a tornado tears through a beloved stretch of woods. Watch his focus drift toward the bottomland and the creek. Solace shifts like the shade on a Sunday afternoon.

He writes, “The force that brought us here remains to carry us away.” If you choose to read these Sabbath poems — especially if you do it outdoors, in your own home terrain — you will be carried into a lifetime of attempted approaches to that force.