The poet Wendell Berry reflects on the sublime peace of escaping into
wilderness
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
The US writer, farmer
and environmental activist Wendell Berry is a quintessential voice of the rural
American South, with his poetry – very much in the tradition of Henry David
Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson – often reflecting on the sublime and spiritual
facets of nature. In one of his best-known poems, ‘The Peace of Wild Things’
(2012), a narrator, despairing at the state of the human world, finds relief in
a journey into nature, being among ‘wild things/who do not tax their lives with
forethought/of grief’. Part of an animated poetry series from the radio and
podcast programme On Being, this adaptation
features Berry himself narrating in a rich, rustic baritone, and lush
watercolour imagery from the UK animator Katy Wang and the UK illustrator
Charlotte Ager.
Directors: Katy Wang, Charlotte Ager
Writer and Narrator: Wendell Berry
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