"All Goes Back to the Earth": The Poetry of Wendell Berry

The name of Wendell Berry first came to my attention about forty years ago. I was then a student at the University of Virginia and a part-time employee of Noonday Book Shop, where a book called November Twenty-Six Nineteen Hundred Sixty-Three enjoyed a brisk sale for several weeks. The text was a single poem by Wendell Berry; it had appeared in The Nation shortly after the assassination and funeral of President Kennedy. The artist Ben Shahn had seen it, and obtained permission to present it in his highly characteristic calligraphy, along with several original images invoked by the poem.

By implication, this is not a poem that Berry cares to have reread, since he omitted it from his Collected Poems 1957-1982 (1985). I therefore feel somewhat apologetic about bringing it briefly into the light again, but I do not do so in order to comment on the wisdom of Berry's decision. It is certainly not an embarrassingly bad poem--far from it--though it is not hard to sympathize with the view that it lacks the monumental durability the occasion would seem to require. What that collaborative book did, however, was to place before a significant readership several of the qualities that have marked much of Berry's poetry ever since.

A close look at the poem reveals what some of these qualities are. The poem opens,

We know the winter earth upon the body of the young
    President, and the early dark falling;

we know the veins grown quiet in his temples and
    wrists, and his hands and eyes grown quiet;

The diction is somewhat formal, yet unpretentious and precise; the verse form is reminiscent of Walt Whitman, but this indebtedness does not adulterate Berry's particular voice. The initial repetition of "we know," which holds for the remaining nine long lines, reminds us that Berry is notably a poet of community. Because he is speaking for his people as well as for himself, the poet occasionally adopts a phrase that we would be surprised to hear in ordinary conversation. When a southerner takes up the language in one hand and holds it against his chest as if it were a harp, we know that when the other hand touches the strings, we will hear something other than informal chat. Among these effects are an elevated tone, arising sometimes from phrasings that might be almost Biblical; swift flashes of precision that hover between consolation and heartbreak; and slightly self-conscious enjoyment of the way an unusual word can find a place that makes it sound exactly right, as, for example, "nightlong" below. The poem touches movingly, because it does so without melodrama, on the passage of individual persons from the earth as the human race persists:

we know the nightlong coming of faces into the candle
    light before his coffin, and their passing;

Very lightly, the poem grazes the subject of human damage to the earth, the theme that readers most readily associate with Berry's work. Here is the ending:

we know ourselves, the bearers of the light of the earth
    he is given to, and of the light of all his lost
    days;

we know the long approach of summers toward the
    healed ground where he will be waiting, no longer the
    keeper of what he was.

Finally, in certain other lines, we can hear the insistence on the message that sometimes asserts itself in Berry's poems:

we know the children who begin the youth of loss
    greater than they can dream now.

A few years ago, in connection with the choice of Wendell Berry as the winner of the 1994 Aiken Taylor Poetry Prize administered by the Sewanee Review, I had the exhilarating and deeply inspiring experience of rereading most of his poetry, mostly in chronological order of publication. There are many fine poems in Collected Poems, which gathers the poems...