{"id":49709,"date":"2026-09-16T15:20:05","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T15:20:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/the-peace-of-wild-things-wendell-berrys-poetic-antidote-to-despair-animated\/"},"modified":"2026-09-16T15:20:05","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T15:20:05","slug":"the-peace-of-wild-things-wendell-berrys-poetic-antidote-to-despair-animated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/the-peace-of-wild-things-wendell-berrys-poetic-antidote-to-despair-animated\/","title":{"rendered":"The Peace of Wild Things: Wendell Berry\u2019s Poetic Antidote to Despair, Animated"},"content":{"rendered":"

On where to seek refuge from the forethought of grief.<\/h3>\n
\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

UPDATE 2022:<\/strong> For more soulful animated poems, see my collaboration with On Being on an animated season of The Universe in Verse<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Two hundred years ago, in a prophetic book envisioning a twenty-first-century world savaged by a deadly pandemic, Mary Shelley considered what makes life worth living<\/a>, insisting that in the midst of widespread death and despair, we must seek peace in the \u201cmurmur of streams, and the gracious waving of trees, the beauteous vesture of earth, and sublime pageantry of the skies.\u201d A century later, Willa Cather \u2014 another immensely talented, immensely underappreciated novelist and poet laureate of the human spirit \u2014 contemplated the deepest wellspring of happiness<\/a> and located it in those moments when, immersed in nature, we find ourselves \u201cdissolved into something complete and great\u201d \u2014 a line now emblazoned on Cather\u2019s tombstone by her partner. <\/p>\n

In another half-century, Wendell Berry<\/strong> (b. August 5, 1934) \u2014 one of the great poets and wisest elders of our time \u2014 arrived at this elemental truth, a truth we so easily lose sight of in those times of despair when we most need it, articulating it with his uncommon tenderness and clarity of vision in the title poem of his 1968 collection The Peace of Wild Things<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), composed under a thick cultural cloudscape of despair \u2014 at the peak of the Cold War and the Vietnam War, after the successive assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Dr. King, in the wake of Silent Spring<\/em> and its disquieting wakeup call<\/a> for our broken relationship with nature.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art from The Blue Hour<\/em><\/a> by Isabelle Simler<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Berry \u2014 a rare seer into those subterranean landscapes of being where nature meets human nature and a rare voice of our collective ecological conscience \u2014 reads the poem in this breathtaking short film, produced by On Being<\/em><\/a> and illustrated by English artist Charlotte Ager<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

\n

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS<\/strong>
\nby Wendell Berry<\/em><\/p>\n

When despair for the world grows in me
\nand I wake in the night at the least sound
\nin fear of what my life and my children\u2019s lives may be,
\nI go and lie down where the wood drake
\nrests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
\nI come into the peace of wild things
\nwho do not tax their lives with forethought
\nof grief. I come into the presence of still water.
\nAnd I feel above me the day-blind stars
\nwaiting with their light. For a time
\nI rest in the grace of the world, and am free.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At the last Universe in Verse<\/em><\/a> \u2014 my charitable celebration of science and the natural world through poetry \u2014 On Being<\/em> creator and host Krista Tippett<\/strong> read Berry\u2019s poem with a lovely prefatory meditation on how poetry gives us the language to remember our creaturely nature, which in turn reroots us in the larger web of belonging as \u201ccreatures among creatures\u201d:<\/p>\n\n

Complement with Wendell Berry on delight as a force of resistance<\/a>, how to be a poet and a complete human being<\/a>, his conscience-clarifying poem \u201cQuestionnaire,\u201d<\/a> and Krista\u2019s soul-salving OnBeing<\/em> conversation<\/a> with him, then revisit two kindred-spirited animated poems: Marie Howe\u2019s \u201cSingularity\u201d<\/a> and Linda France\u2019s \u201cMurmuration.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

donating = loving<\/h3>\n

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian<\/em> (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings<\/em><\/a> for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation<\/a>. Your support makes all the difference.<\/p>\n

\n

newsletter<\/h3>\n

The Marginalian<\/em> has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect<\/a>. Like? Sign up.<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On where to seek refuge from the forethought of grief. UPDATE 2022: For more soulful animated poems, see my collaboration with On Being on an animated season of The Universe in Verse. Two hundred years ago, in a prophetic book envisioning a twenty-first-century world savaged by a deadly pandemic, Mary Shelley considered what makes life […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49710,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-life"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-25 11:19:30","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}