The Full Text of “The Peace of Wild Things”
The Full Text of “The Peace of Wild Things”
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“The Peace of Wild Things” Introduction
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"The Peace of Wild Things" is one of American poet Wendell Berry's most enduring and widely-loved poems. First published in 1968, the poem illustrates the soothing, restorative power of nature. When feeling anxiety about the future, the speaker goes outside and lies down in the grass, near birds and tranquil waters. There, the speaker finds "peace" in the "grace" of nature, and, if only for a moment, is freed from fear.
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“The Peace of Wild Things” Summary
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Whenever I start feeling increasingly upset about the world, so on edge that the slightest sound wakes me up at night and I'm scared about how my life and my children's lives will turn out, I get out into nature and rest nearby a duck sleeping beautifully on the water and a great heron eating its food. I embrace the calmness and serenity that comes with being surrounding by the untamed world, in which animals don't waste their time thinking about future sorrows. I get close to tranquil water. I sense the presence of the stars above me, which you can't see during the day, waiting until it's nighttime so they can shine. For a little while, the beauty and simplicity of nature calm me and frees me from worry.
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“The Peace of Wild Things” Themes
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The Soothing Power of Nature
"The Peace of Wild Things" celebrates nature's ability to refresh and restore the human mind. The speaker, full of despair and fear, finds a kind of "peace" among the "wild things" of the natural world, which—unlike humans—don’t worry about whatever might happen next and instead live in the present. The poem implies that, for all humanity's complexity and advancement, nature remains a vital source of wisdom and consolation.
The speaker’s anxiety suggests that human beings, uniquely among all creatures, have a talent for being afraid of things that haven’t even happened yet. The speaker often wakes during the night, full of "despair for the world" and fear for the future. In this state, the "least sound” suggests danger and threat. The speaker gets so worked up that the whole world seems menacing, even though nothing is immediately wrong.
This kind of anxiety, the poem suggests, isn’t unusual, but rather is part of the human experience: the speaker describes these late-night fears matter-of-factly, as if certain that the rest of humanity has similar anxieties.
But the everyday course of the natural world offers the nervous speaker comfort. Nature is "wild" and instinctive, full of "beauty"—and doesn’t seem to worry about what might happen next. When the speaker’s worries are at their worst, the speaker goes outside to “rest” and finds that everything in nature is just calmly doing what it does, rather than fretting about the future.
The wood drake "rests in his beauty on the water," a lake or pond lies quiet and still, and stars in the sky go about their starry business. For the speaker, this lack of anxious "forethought" in nature gives the natural world a beautiful and rejuvenating sense of "grace" and "peace."
The poem thus encourages its readers to learn from nature and not to get too lost in anxious “forethought.” Because nature exists fully in the present, not in fear of the future, it can both act as a kind of safety valve (relieving the pressures of everyday life when they become unbearable) and as a teacher. Simply “rest[ing]” in nature while it goes about its business helps the speaker to feel "free," and to understand just how futile anxiety really is.
The speaker's sense of natural freedom and wisdom doesn’t last forever, of course: it’s just "for a time." Even for a moment, though, nature grounds the speaker in reality, settling this person's spirit. Overall, then, the poem implies that humanity should cherish, nurture, and learn from the natural world that it calls home.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-11
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Peace of Wild Things”
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Lines 1-3
When despair for ...
... lives may be,The poem's first three lines capture the speaker’s anxious, fretful state of mind. Sometimes the speaker is so full of sorrow and anxiety that even the slightest sound can wake them up at night. They're totally on edge thinking about how life will turn out for both them and their children.
The “fear” the speaker talks about in these lines isn’t anything specific, but a kind of general worry about what is going to happen in the future. Given the poem’s focus on ecology and nature, the “despair” that the speaker feels could relate to the future of the planet itself. Or, considering this poem was written around the time of the Vietnam War and the Cold War, perhaps the speaker worries about humankind destroying itself.
Keeping things general, though, gives the poem a universal feel. The lack of specifics is part of the poem’s power: most people can relate to that visiting sense of dread when the mind runs away with itself during the small hours.
Of course, this all starts with a "When"—when the speaker feels these things, something happens. The speaker delays that something for these three lines, however, which evokes the sense of mounting anxiety. The deliberate delay of the response to that "When" creates tension, the reader searching for grammatical relief that takes a long time to come.
Enjambment contributes to this sense of restlessness too, the speaker's thoughts seeming to run away with themselves across multiple lines. Line 3 also uses subtle repetition, highlighted below:
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
The repetition of “my” and “life/lives” (the latter being polyptoton) make the line feel jumpy and pained, evoking the way an anxious mind cycles repeatedly through patterns of thought. If the speaker’s not worrying about their own life, they're worrying about their children’s future, or that of the entire world—and these worries keep coming back during the night, bubbling up from the subconscious mind and waking the speaker up.
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Lines 4-5
I go and ...
... great heron feeds. -
Lines 6-8
I come into ...
... of grief. -
Line 8
I come into ... of still water.
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Lines 9-11
And I feel ...
... and am free.
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“The Peace of Wild Things” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Allusion
In line 8, the poem makes what may be an allusion to Psalm 23:
I come into the presence of still water.
Psalm 23 appears in the Old Testament of the Bible:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.Both poem and psalm focus on the restoration of the soul/state of mind, and both suggest this is achieved through "lying down" in the beauty of nature. Notably, though, there is no God to act as a shepherd in Berry's poem. Instead, the poem focuses purely on the natural world. Nature has a kind of presence that might feel like God to some, but the poem isn't explicitly religious.
Where allusion appears in the poem:- Line 8: “I come into the presence of still water.”
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Caesura
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Consonance
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End-Stopped Line
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Enjambment
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Metaphor
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Paradox
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Parallelism
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"The Peace of Wild Things" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Least
- Wood Drake
- Heron
- Tax
- Forethought
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(Location in poem: Lines 2-2: “I wake in the night at the / sound”; Line 2: “least”)
Most insignificant, slightest.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Peace of Wild Things”
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Form
"The Peace of Wild Things" is made up of 11 lines written as one single block of text. There's no standard form here (unlike, say, a sonnet), nor any regular meter or rhyme scheme. This works for a contemplative, contemporary poem about the delights of "wild things" and living in the moment rather than fretting about the future. Having no set, predictable form makes the poem itself seem all the more natural and wild.
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Meter
The poem is written in free verse, meaning it has no regular meter or rhyme scheme. As a result, it feels casual, conversational, and reflective, rather than strictly controlled. The relative looseness of the poem's language evokes the "peace of wild things"—the beauty and serenity of nature left to do its thing. The speaker intentionally escapes the human world, including its complex metrical schemes.
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Rhyme Scheme
As a free verse poem, "The Peace of Wild Things" doesn't have a rhyme scheme. Instead, its language is loose, simple, and organic. The speaker admires the wildness of nature, and, accordingly, the poem is a little wild too (like a hedge that hasn't been trimmed into neat rhyming shapes).
That said, there is a very distant rhyme between "me" in line 1 and "free" in line 11, the first and last end words of the poem. These words, taken as a pair, tell the poem in miniature, the natural environment offering the speaker freedom ("free") from the maze-like constructions of their own mind ("me").
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“The Peace of Wild Things” Speaker
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Though the poem is written in the first person, the reader learns little about the speaker's identity beyond the fact that this person is an adult, has a family, and often worries about the future.
The poem doesn't specify the nature of these worries, either. Keeping things vague helps keep the poem's message more universal: anyone who's ever been jolted awake at night by fears about what's to come can likely identify with the poem's speaker, and thus with the poem's message about finding a sense of peace and release within nature.
It's also very easy to read the speaker as Wendell Berry himself. Berry is a committed environmentalist, and there's thus an overlap between his own views and this speaker's gratitude for "the peace of wild things" (that is, nature).
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“The Peace of Wild Things” Setting
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The poem has two implied settings:
- The action begins "when" the speaker is overtaken by despair and has woken in the night. Presumably, then, the poem starts in the speaker's house.
- Then, the poem moves outside. The speaker goes to "lie down" near a calm body of water, like a lake or pond.
The contrast between these two settings is part of the poem's message. In the orderly human world, the speaker gets overwhelmed by anxieties about the future. The speaker then finds peace in nature, where "wild things" don't spend time worrying about what's to come, but simply exist: ducks are just being ducks, herons are just being herons, lakes are just being lakes, and so on. The setting thus plays a crucial role in the poem, rescuing the speaker from "despair" and offering "the grace of the world," in which the speaker feels "free."
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Peace of Wild Things”
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Literary Context
Wendell Berry, born in 1934, is an American poet, essayist, environmental activist, and farmer. Born into a farming family in Kentucky, Berry grew up close to nature and would go on to buy his own farm in 1965. This agricultural work has informed Berry's writing, which often displays a clear-eyed admiration for and concern over the natural world.
As an artist, Berry has won numerous prizes and in 2010 was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama. "The Peace of Wild Things," Berry's best-known poem, was published in Openings, his second collection (1968).
In his focus on nature, Berry has drawn comparisons with Romantic poets like John Clare and William Wordsworth. In Romantic poetry, nature often offers a kind of escape from the pressures of modern, urban life. Berry turns to nature in much of his poetry, but he rejects being overly sentimental or mythological about it. Berry's work often focuses on the idea that learning to respectfully coexist with the natural world is essential to humanity's survival.
Historical Context
"The Peace of Wild Things" was first published in 1968, during an era of political and social upheaval in the U.S. The Cold War with the U.S.S.R. had peaked with the Cuban Missile Crisis just a few years earlier, while the country was continuing to send soldiers to fight in—and was spending huge amounts of money on—the Vietnam War.
Both subjects are mentioned in the same collection that houses "The Peace of Wild Things": "Against the War in Vietnam" lambasts the American state for its "lies" and bloodthirsty longing for "millions of little deaths," while "To a Siberian Woodsman" sees Berry empathizing deeply with a man who is supposed to be his enemy.
Berry's work as the time clearly reflects the poet's anxiety over the direction of the world and a desire to find solace by stepping away from the "despair" of human-made catastrophes like war and environmental destruction.
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More “The Peace of Wild Things” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Out Loud — Listen to a reading by the poet himself.
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Berry in the New Yorker — Check out a rare interview with the poet exploring contemporary political issues.
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Berry's Biography — Read more about Berry's life and work via the Poetry Foundation.
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Berry on Life — An interview with the poet that discusses his principles and way of life.
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