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This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems
Wendell Berry’s Sabbath Poems are filled with spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer, pushed to the edge yet again by his compatriots and elected officials. With the publication of this new complete edition, it has become increasingly clear that the Sabbath Poems have become the very heart of Berry’s work. And these magnificent poems, taken as a whole for the first time in This Day , have become one of the greatest contributions ever made to American poetry.
404 pages, Hardcover
First published September 16, 2013
634 people are currently reading
1743 people want to read
About the author
Wendell Berry
292 books4,876 followersWendell Berry is a conservationist, farmer, essayist, novelist, professor of English and poet. He was born August 5, 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky where he now lives on a farm. The New York Times has called Berry the "prophet of rural America."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 102 reviews
May 2, 2020
It was very hard to pick a favorite poem from this beautiful book. I choose 3 to add, this was a perfect book to read with everything that is going on in the world right now.
What do the tall trees say
To the late havocs in the sky?
They sigh.
The air moves, and they sway.
When the breeze on the hill
Is still, they they stand still.
They wait.
They have no fear. Their fate
Is faith. Birdsong
Is all they've wanted, all along.
-
Off in the woods in the quiet
morning a redbird is singing
and his song goes out around him
greater than its purpose,
a welcoming room of song
in which the trees stand,
through which the creek flows.
-
p. 261
I know that I have life
only insofar as I have love.
I have no love
except it come from Thee.
Help me, please, to carry
this candle against the wind.
What do the tall trees say
To the late havocs in the sky?
They sigh.
The air moves, and they sway.
When the breeze on the hill
Is still, they they stand still.
They wait.
They have no fear. Their fate
Is faith. Birdsong
Is all they've wanted, all along.
-
Off in the woods in the quiet
morning a redbird is singing
and his song goes out around him
greater than its purpose,
a welcoming room of song
in which the trees stand,
through which the creek flows.
-
p. 261
I know that I have life
only insofar as I have love.
I have no love
except it come from Thee.
Help me, please, to carry
this candle against the wind.
January 23, 2023
Summary: A compilation of several volumes of Berry’s sabbath poems.
We learn in the preface and introduction to these poems that they were composed by Wendell Berry during his Sabbaths, which he observed each Sunday. He tells us that many of them were written out of doors. Some of the poems even record Berry reclining in the woods near his home and falling asleep. Some, as the introductory poem suggests, were written looking out the window from his study, looking down the sloping property that is his farm to the river that flows into the Ohio.
He records the work of caring for the healing of his sloping lands. He writes in the introduction of having hoped the pasture would revert to forest, but rather his ewes ate the tree saplings. Instead, he tends the pasture in 2005, X “Mowing the hillside pasture–where.” He describes the Queen Anne’s lace, the milkweeds, butterflies, voles, and the contours of the healing slopes for which “He sweats and gives thanks.” In the next poem he speaks of imparting these experiences to his grandson, remembering when he was the young boy waving to an old workman in a pasture.
It is little wonder with someone so committed to the attentive care of his land that many of the poems celebrate the wonders he observes on his farm or the neighboring woods and streams. In 1998, IV, “The woods and pastures are joyous” describes the coming of another spring, the sheep and cattle “like souls in bliss,” the abundant growth and birdsong, and asks, “Who now can believe in winter? In winter who could have hoped for this?”
It also wouldn’t be Wendell Berry if he weren’t decrying the destruction of the land. His poems of 2007 describe this and his struggle to hold onto hope. He returns to his own land and finds hope amid the hopelessness in the renewal of life he witnesses.
Some of the poems are in the voice of characters from his novels, the Port William Membership, including Andy Catlett, Burley Coulter, and Jayber Crow. In others, he speaks of himself in the third person, as in 2011, VII,”A man who loves the trees” where he walks among his “elders” when he sees “a dogwood flower-white lighting all the woods.” In some, he adopts the voice of the Mad Farmer, as in the concluding poem of the collection, 2012, XXI, “As a child, the Mad Farmer saw easily” recounting the captivating vision of the star and the angelic host announcing the Christ child to shepherds that captivated him as a child, fading in the horrors of modernity and fears for what is to come. Yet as a pilgrim, “He sets out.”
I was surprised by the number of poems remembering friends who have died and reflecting on his own advancing years. In 2005, VII, Berry makes an observation that would find many of us nodding our heads in agreement: “I know I am getting old and I say so/but I don’t think of myself as an old man./I think of myself as a young man/with unforeseen debilities.”
Some of the most touching poems are those marking anniversaries and talking about what it is like for two people to love one another in all the ways couples love for many years. He celebrates the power of the marriage vow in 2009, VI “Our vow is the plumb line.” It is a line that seems to separate as both speak, “but vanishing as only we two know when we indeed are one.”
A final theme recurring in many poems is Berry’s piety. He doesn’t “wear this on his sleeve,” filling his poems with references to faith, When he speaks, it is powerful as in these six lines from 2005, I:
"I know that I have life
only insofar as I have love.
I have no love
except it come from Thee.
Help me, please, to carry
this candle against the wind."
Berry advises, “I hope some readers will read them as they were written: slowly, and with more patience than effort.” A friend who has read this collected comments that she loved taking these on sabbath walks, and reading and pondering one each sabbath. That may be a good approach to these poems that direct our thoughts to the most important matters of our lives as well as the sheer wonder amid which we move, that we often miss in our distraction and hurry. But then, is this not why we sabbath?
We learn in the preface and introduction to these poems that they were composed by Wendell Berry during his Sabbaths, which he observed each Sunday. He tells us that many of them were written out of doors. Some of the poems even record Berry reclining in the woods near his home and falling asleep. Some, as the introductory poem suggests, were written looking out the window from his study, looking down the sloping property that is his farm to the river that flows into the Ohio.
He records the work of caring for the healing of his sloping lands. He writes in the introduction of having hoped the pasture would revert to forest, but rather his ewes ate the tree saplings. Instead, he tends the pasture in 2005, X “Mowing the hillside pasture–where.” He describes the Queen Anne’s lace, the milkweeds, butterflies, voles, and the contours of the healing slopes for which “He sweats and gives thanks.” In the next poem he speaks of imparting these experiences to his grandson, remembering when he was the young boy waving to an old workman in a pasture.
It is little wonder with someone so committed to the attentive care of his land that many of the poems celebrate the wonders he observes on his farm or the neighboring woods and streams. In 1998, IV, “The woods and pastures are joyous” describes the coming of another spring, the sheep and cattle “like souls in bliss,” the abundant growth and birdsong, and asks, “Who now can believe in winter? In winter who could have hoped for this?”
It also wouldn’t be Wendell Berry if he weren’t decrying the destruction of the land. His poems of 2007 describe this and his struggle to hold onto hope. He returns to his own land and finds hope amid the hopelessness in the renewal of life he witnesses.
Some of the poems are in the voice of characters from his novels, the Port William Membership, including Andy Catlett, Burley Coulter, and Jayber Crow. In others, he speaks of himself in the third person, as in 2011, VII,”A man who loves the trees” where he walks among his “elders” when he sees “a dogwood flower-white lighting all the woods.” In some, he adopts the voice of the Mad Farmer, as in the concluding poem of the collection, 2012, XXI, “As a child, the Mad Farmer saw easily” recounting the captivating vision of the star and the angelic host announcing the Christ child to shepherds that captivated him as a child, fading in the horrors of modernity and fears for what is to come. Yet as a pilgrim, “He sets out.”
I was surprised by the number of poems remembering friends who have died and reflecting on his own advancing years. In 2005, VII, Berry makes an observation that would find many of us nodding our heads in agreement: “I know I am getting old and I say so/but I don’t think of myself as an old man./I think of myself as a young man/with unforeseen debilities.”
Some of the most touching poems are those marking anniversaries and talking about what it is like for two people to love one another in all the ways couples love for many years. He celebrates the power of the marriage vow in 2009, VI “Our vow is the plumb line.” It is a line that seems to separate as both speak, “but vanishing as only we two know when we indeed are one.”
A final theme recurring in many poems is Berry’s piety. He doesn’t “wear this on his sleeve,” filling his poems with references to faith, When he speaks, it is powerful as in these six lines from 2005, I:
"I know that I have life
only insofar as I have love.
I have no love
except it come from Thee.
Help me, please, to carry
this candle against the wind."
Berry advises, “I hope some readers will read them as they were written: slowly, and with more patience than effort.” A friend who has read this collected comments that she loved taking these on sabbath walks, and reading and pondering one each sabbath. That may be a good approach to these poems that direct our thoughts to the most important matters of our lives as well as the sheer wonder amid which we move, that we often miss in our distraction and hurry. But then, is this not why we sabbath?
March 2, 2020
A dense and beautiful collection of poems that perfectly encapsulate all the things that make Wendell Berry such an approachable and timeless poet. He repeats themes a lot, but never presents them in a way that feels redundant. He lets his passions and frustrations and fears shine, and reading his work—especially out loud—is a meditative and almost healing. You can’t help but hear the sounds of nature while reading Berry’s work.
Berry might not be the most profound or technically stunning of poets—although I’d never admit to being able to define what those traits should even look like—but he is a master of voice and tone and lures his reader in with an air of simplicity and then traps them with his layered and complex thematics. There were countless times throughout this collection where a poem would gently take me by the hand, walk me through it’s beautiful language, and then sucker punch me with a final, decisive line or stanza that left me reeling. That’s the beauty of Berry’s poetry.
I can’t recommend this book enough.
Berry might not be the most profound or technically stunning of poets—although I’d never admit to being able to define what those traits should even look like—but he is a master of voice and tone and lures his reader in with an air of simplicity and then traps them with his layered and complex thematics. There were countless times throughout this collection where a poem would gently take me by the hand, walk me through it’s beautiful language, and then sucker punch me with a final, decisive line or stanza that left me reeling. That’s the beauty of Berry’s poetry.
I can’t recommend this book enough.
December 22, 2017
You can almost smell the earth and hear the bird song. Honest. Tender. Observant. Measured. Connected. Wendell Berry is so full of love and respect for God's creation and his own small place in it.
January 12, 2024
Received a text from Katie saying “go outside” to a delivery of this collection of poems 🥹 on top of that on our wedding week Katie texted A and I a poem in this collection that was in Austin’s vows. Magic all around- a whoooooole lot of poems in this one that spoke to nature and made me want to quit my corporate job and sit in the woods and take care of the Earth. Wholesome and important reminders of what we were created for.
POTB: “How many of vour birthdays
I have by now been glad of! And all that time I've been trying to tell you how with vou was born my truest life and most desired, the better man by your birth I am, however fallen short. I'll never get it right by half.
Between us, by now, what is more telling than the silence in which once more an old redbud simply blooms?”
POTB: “How many of vour birthdays
I have by now been glad of! And all that time I've been trying to tell you how with vou was born my truest life and most desired, the better man by your birth I am, however fallen short. I'll never get it right by half.
Between us, by now, what is more telling than the silence in which once more an old redbud simply blooms?”
September 18, 2024
I slowly worked through this book of poetry over a couple of years and it was worth savoring! As I’ve become better acquainted with a wider variety of poets as I’ve homeschooled my children, I’ve come to love and appreciate Berry’s voice and style, and hope his poems will be read and remembered by coming generations. Many of the poems in this volume were heartbreakingly beautiful and deeply thought-provoking. His “sabbath mood” poem will probably remain with me for the rest of my life!
Berry uses a lot of Christian imagery and ideas in his poems, but it’s worth noting that his relationship to nature and place, while beautiful in so many ways and certainly what he is known for, feels a little off kilter at times. Towards the later years in this volume, his language shifts, and it almost seems that Nature is a god against whom we humans are transgressing, and from whom we should be asking forgiveness, giving our lives to mend our wrongs. There certainly are major stewardship issues in our world and time, and a sad loss of connection to place and nature, and these poems helped me to think more about that. Berry has a lot of experience and wisdom that should be seriously considered. But we have to be careful to define sin and righteousness, forgiveness and justification the way God does, and know that our salvation is not in the land, but only in trusting Jesus Christ and his sacrifice for our sins. I think the lines can get a little blurred in some of his writing in the later poems. All of that said, I think many of the poems in the rest of the book are really wonderful, and even more so when you have some healthy categories in place. The God of the universe, the Creator of all of the natural world, can help us to know him more and worship him (not nature itself) through his created world, to enjoy it as a good gift, and to steward it wisely.
Berry uses a lot of Christian imagery and ideas in his poems, but it’s worth noting that his relationship to nature and place, while beautiful in so many ways and certainly what he is known for, feels a little off kilter at times. Towards the later years in this volume, his language shifts, and it almost seems that Nature is a god against whom we humans are transgressing, and from whom we should be asking forgiveness, giving our lives to mend our wrongs. There certainly are major stewardship issues in our world and time, and a sad loss of connection to place and nature, and these poems helped me to think more about that. Berry has a lot of experience and wisdom that should be seriously considered. But we have to be careful to define sin and righteousness, forgiveness and justification the way God does, and know that our salvation is not in the land, but only in trusting Jesus Christ and his sacrifice for our sins. I think the lines can get a little blurred in some of his writing in the later poems. All of that said, I think many of the poems in the rest of the book are really wonderful, and even more so when you have some healthy categories in place. The God of the universe, the Creator of all of the natural world, can help us to know him more and worship him (not nature itself) through his created world, to enjoy it as a good gift, and to steward it wisely.
March 12, 2024
It will take me many months to finish this, but it’s amazing. I read it every Sunday. My favorite concept so far is how our Christian concept of Sabbath rest is inherently tied to a love for the earth.
October 11, 2024
Perfection. No notes.
Read
August 14, 2025Beautiful. More than 8 months of almost daily reading. Time well spent
March 10, 2023
Startling, tender and defiant. This is the first full book of poetry I have ever read.
December 31, 2014
They span the years 1979 to 2013. For all those years the poet Wendell Berry has been in the habit of taking solitary Sunday walks around his farm and holdings in Kentucky. And in the habit of writing poems about what he saw and experienced on those walks. The result is an impressively extensive body of work called Sabbath Poems. They're published in their entirety as This Day: Sabbath Poems Collected and New 1979-2013.
These are all relatively short poems. They're meditative and Thoreau-like. They're pastoral, nature-conscious, and, as you might expect, observant of every personality of the seasons, aware of every type of wingbeat and footpad of life there. These poems are always sensitive to the passage of time, and they're modest and grateful for the world. In recent years the poems have become more spiritual. Thinking about Berry's awareness of and ability to articulate the wholeness of existence, it's no wonder he's been compared to the great Roman poet Horace.
This is a remarkable sequence of poems. This is the kind of volume you want to keep nearby so as to be able to open it frequently and be brought back into contact with Berry's easy comfort in the world. He writes about his home in Kentucky, but the specific location doesn't matter because it's everywhere.
These are all relatively short poems. They're meditative and Thoreau-like. They're pastoral, nature-conscious, and, as you might expect, observant of every personality of the seasons, aware of every type of wingbeat and footpad of life there. These poems are always sensitive to the passage of time, and they're modest and grateful for the world. In recent years the poems have become more spiritual. Thinking about Berry's awareness of and ability to articulate the wholeness of existence, it's no wonder he's been compared to the great Roman poet Horace.
This is a remarkable sequence of poems. This is the kind of volume you want to keep nearby so as to be able to open it frequently and be brought back into contact with Berry's easy comfort in the world. He writes about his home in Kentucky, but the specific location doesn't matter because it's everywhere.
December 11, 2021
I can't sit down and consume a lot of these at one time. But every time I open this book there are treasures galore. 34 years of Sabbath reflections. Whether he called it that or not, Berry is no stranger to the rhythms of rest. Marvelous insight set to poetry. Excellent material for weekly, monthly, or annual readings.
July 5, 2021
I’ve spent every morning with this book over the past 2 months. It’s become an incredibly special and important book to me. These poems were breath. They’ve slowed me down. They’ve helped me rest. They’ve carried me into healing spaces in my own writing. I’ll be coming back to these always. This book will be one I’ll be holding onto for the long haul
January 20, 2014
It is mildly rrdiculous for a reader to give "stars" for a rating to a book of poems as wonderful as this one. But I do, hoping others will follow the stars to the poet and learn from him, as I have.
June 17, 2021
If you're going to have a book of Wendell Berry poems, this is it.
And Lord have mercy, is it worth having. Berry's writing is earthy and grounded, spirit-filled and elegiac, radiant with an honest, dirt-under-the-fingernails love of creation. The poems themselves are almost entirely wonderful. Some are personal, more are economic, several are political. Most are songs to life and field and forest, a that hard, slower, more rooted sense of being human that we now have mostly forgotten.
A few are so filled with glory...like the poem A Timbered Choir...that the hairs on my arm stand on end and I tremble a little in the reading, as one does when one is growing dangerously close to the Holy.
I love this book.
And Lord have mercy, is it worth having. Berry's writing is earthy and grounded, spirit-filled and elegiac, radiant with an honest, dirt-under-the-fingernails love of creation. The poems themselves are almost entirely wonderful. Some are personal, more are economic, several are political. Most are songs to life and field and forest, a that hard, slower, more rooted sense of being human that we now have mostly forgotten.
A few are so filled with glory...like the poem A Timbered Choir...that the hairs on my arm stand on end and I tremble a little in the reading, as one does when one is growing dangerously close to the Holy.
I love this book.
June 7, 2019
Thanks to Goodreads, I know I’ve spent nearly 18 months with these poems, and they truly ushered in so much Sabbath in that time.
I realize not every poem in the collection is a 5-star one, but I give 5 stars to this incredible tribute to the growth of a man, a mind, a voice, a message. I think the crowning achievement is toward the end—“The Book of Camp Branch” which I would like to memorize, and which I suspect is a sister poem to Berry’s book of essays Standing By Words (coming up this year in my apprenticeship!).
I realize not every poem in the collection is a 5-star one, but I give 5 stars to this incredible tribute to the growth of a man, a mind, a voice, a message. I think the crowning achievement is toward the end—“The Book of Camp Branch” which I would like to memorize, and which I suspect is a sister poem to Berry’s book of essays Standing By Words (coming up this year in my apprenticeship!).
August 12, 2021
This collection of poems was stellar. I read a poem a day for quite some time and I'm so grateful for Wendell Berry and his artful way of voicing his thoughts. His care toward the world and environment are so obvious and I appreciate his love of simplicity and the beauty that can be found in it. I will miss starting every day with one of his poems from this beautiful collection and would recommend this book to any and all readers.
June 3, 2024
A magnificent collection of Berry's poetry. Each poems draws our attention to nature and the Sabbath. A thought-provoking work for Christians.
December 30, 2023
Stylistically not my favorite kind of poetry, but certainly has that good Wendell Berry flavor to it.
October 13, 2019
When I was younger, I discovered this poet, and marveled at how much his poetry spoke to me, a southern farmer born before my parents, and me a wandering gypsy in love with the world: and that is our connection. In this collection, he is open and honest and angry and religious; but speaks of the light and trees like I feel of the light and trees. A lot of poems were about farming and tilling the land; and a lot were about religion; and a lot about conservation, but through it all, he writes poems about his wife and kids and grandchildren and it is all woven with the light of nature, of the earth, of simplicity and complexity paired with mindfulness. Beautiful.
Nature of course includes damage as a part of her wholeness. Her creatures live only by the deaths of other creatures. Wind, flood, and fire are as much her means of world-making as birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay. She destroys and she heals. Her ways are cyclic, but she is absolutely original. She never exactly repeats herself, and this is the source equally of our grief and our delight. But Nature’s damages are followed by her healings, though not necessarily on a human schedule or in human time.
That one is sometimes able, among the disturbances of the present world, to wander into some good and beautiful whereabouts of the woods, grow quiet, and come to rest is a gift, a wonder, and a kind of grace.
He is a tree of a sort, rooted in the dark, aspiring to the light, dependent on both. His poems are leavings, sheddings, gathered from the light, as it has come, and offered to the dark, which he believes must shine with sight, with light, dark only to him.
He sets out at times without even a path or any guidance other than knowledge of the place and himself as they were in time already past. He goes among trees, climbing again the one hill of his life. With his hand full of words he goes into the wordless, wording it barely in time as he passes. One by one he places words, balancing on each as on a small stone in the swift flow
1979 I I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle. Then what is afraid of me comes and lives a while in my sight. What it fears in me leaves me, and the fear of me leaves it. It sings, and I hear its song. Then what I am afraid of comes. I live for a while in its sight. What I fear in it leaves it, and the fear of it leaves me. It sings, and I hear its song. After days of labor, mute in my consternations, I hear my song at last, and I sing it. As we sing, the day turns...
here nothing grieves In the risen season. Past life Lives in the living. Resurrection Is in the way each maple leaf Commemorates its kind, by connection Outreaching understanding. What rises Rises into comprehension And beyond. Even falling raises In praise of light. What is begun Is unfinished. And so the mind That comes to rest among the bluebells Comes to rest in motion, refined By alteration. The bud swells, Opens, makes seed, falls, is well, Being becoming what it is: Miracle and parable Exceeding thought, because it is Immeasurable; the understander Encloses understanding.
To sit and look at light-filled leaves May let us see, or seem to see, Far backward as through clearer eyes To what unsighted hope believes:
Whatever is foreseen in joy Must be lived out from day to day,
Foredooms the body to the use of light, Light into light returning, as the stream Of days flows downward through us into night, And into light and life and time to come.
The year drives on toward what it will become.
To long for what eternity fulfills Is to forsake the light one has, or wills To have, and go into the dark, to wait What light may come—no light perhaps, the dark Insinuates. And yet the dark conceals All possibilities: thought, word, and light, Air, water, earth, motion, and song, the arc Of lives through light, eyesight, hope, rest, and work—
Such a bliss Of bloom’s no ornament, but root And light, a saving loveliness, Starred firmament here underfoot.
Thrush song, stream song, holy love That flows through earthly forms and folds, The song of Heaven’s Sabbath fleshed In throat and ear, in stream and stone, A grace living here as we live, Move my mind now to that which holds Things as they change. The warmth has come. The doors have opened. Flower and song Embroider ground and air, lead me Beside the healing field that waits; Growth, death, and a restoring form Of human use will make it well. But I go on, beyond, higher In the hill’s fold, forget the time I come from and go to, recall This grove left out of all account...
Beyond all history that he knows, Where trees like great saints stand in time, Eternal in their patience.
Estranged by distance, he relearns The way to quiet not his own, The light at rest on tree and stone, The high leaves falling in their turns, Spiraling through the air made gold By their slow fall. Bright on the ground, They wait their darkening, commend To coming light the light they hold.
The sky bright after summer-ending rain, I sat against an oak half up the climb. The sun was low; the woods was hushed in shadow; Now the long shimmer of the crickets’ song Had stopped. I looked up to the westward ridge And saw the ripe October light again, Shining through leaves still green yet turning gold. Those glowing leaves made of the light a place That time and leaf would leave. The wind came cool, And then I knew that I was present in The long age of the passing world, in which I once was not, now am, and will not be, And in that time, beneath the changing tree, I rested.
Remember the small secret creases of the earth—the grassy, the wooded, the rocky—that the water has made, finding its way. Remember the voices of the water flowing. Remember the water flowing under the shadows of the trees, of the tall grasses, of the stones. Remember the water striders walking over the surface of the water as it flowed. Remember the great sphere of the small wren’s song, through which the water flowed and the light fell. Remember, and come to rest in light’s ordinary miracle.
Go by the narrow road Along the creek, a burrow Under shadowy trees Such as a mouse makes through Tall grass, so that you may Forget the wide road you Have left behind, and all That it has led to. Or, Best, walk up through the woods, Around the valley rim, And down to where the trees Give way to cleared hillside, So that you reach the place Out of the trees’ remembrance Of their kind; seasonal And timeless, they stand in Uncounted time,
Loving you has taught me the infinite longing of the self to be given away and the great difficulty of that entire giving, for in love to give is to receive and then there is yet more to give; and others have been born of our giving to whom the self, greatened by gifts, must be given, and by that giving be increased, until, self-burdened, the self, staggering upward in years, in fear, hope, love, and sorrow, imagines, rising like a moon, a pale moon risen in daylight over the dark woods, the Self whose gift we and all others are, the self that is by definition given.
Finally will it not be enough, after much living, after much love, after much dying of those you have loved, to sit on the porch near sundown with your eyes simply open, watching the wind shape the clouds into the shapes of clouds? Even then you will remember the history of love, shaped in the shapes of flesh, ever changing as the clouds that pass, the blessed yearning of body for body, unending light. You will remember, watching the clouds, the future of love.
Or I give myself to gravity, light, and air and am carried back to solitary work in fields and woods, where my hands rest upon a world unnamed, complete, unanswerable, and final as our daily bread and meat. The way of love leads all ways to life beyond words, silent and secret. To serve that triumph I have done all the rest.
Now you know the worst we humans have to know about ourselves, and I am sorry, for I know that you will be afraid. To those of our bodies given without pity to be burned, I know there is no answer but loving one another, even our enemies, and this is hard. But remember: when a man of war becomes a man of peace, he gives a light, divine though it is also human. When a man of peace is killed by a man of war, he gives a light. You do not have to walk in darkness. If you will have the courage for love, you may walk in light. It will be the light of those who have suffered for peace.
I stood still a long time for fear that any sound I made would cause that flood of light, which was singing which was light, to flow away forever from this flawed world.
There is a day when the road neither comes nor goes, and the way is not a way but a place.
There is a place you can go where you are quiet, a place of water and the light on the water. Trees are there, leaves, and the light on leaves moved by air. Birds, singing, move among leaves, in leaf shadow. After many years you have come to no thought of these, but they are themselves your thoughts. There seems to be little to say, less and less. Here they are. Here you are. Here as though gone. None of us stays, but in the hush where each leaf in the speech of leaves is a sufficient syllable the passing light finds out surpassing freedom of its way.
I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows where the rarest wildflowers are blooming, and who goes, and finds that he is smiling not by his own will.
The spring woods hastening now To overshadow him, He’s passing in to where He can’t see out. It charms Mere eyesight to believe The nearest thing not trees Is the sky, into which The trees reach, opening Their luminous new leaves. Burdened only by A weightless shawl of shade The lighted leaves let fall, He seems to move within A form unpatterned to His eye or mind, design Betokened to his thought By leafshapes tossed about. Ways indescribable By human tongue or hand Seem tangled here, and yet Are brought to light, are brought To life, and thought finds rest Beneath a brightened tree.
We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see Ahead, but looking back the very light That blinded us shows us the way we came, Along which blessings now appear, risen As if from sightlessness to sight, and we, By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward The blesséd light that yet to us is dark.
Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.
The trees rise in silence almost natural, but not quite, almost eternal, but not quite. What more did I think I wanted? Here is what has always been. Here is what will always be. Even in me, the Maker of all this returns in rest, even to the slightest of His works, a yellow leaf slowly falling, and is pleased.
When we convene again to understand the world, the first speaker will again point silently out the window at the hillside in its season, sunlit, under the snow, and we will nod silently, and silently stand and go.
The sun Comes from the dark, it lights The always passing river, Shines on the great-branched tree, And goes. Longing and dark, We are completely filled With breath of love, in us Forever incomplete.
I know for a while again the health of self-forgetfulness, looking out at the sky through a notch in the valley side, the black woods wintry on the hills, small clouds at sunset passing across. And I know that this is one of the thresholds between Earth and Heaven, from which even I may step forth from my self and be free.
Some had derided him As unadventurous, For he would not give up What he had vowed to keep. But what he vowed to keep Even his keeping changed And, changing, led him far Beyond what they or he Foresaw, and made him strange. What he had vowed to keep He lost, of course, and yet Kept in his heart. The things He vowed to keep, the things He had in keeping changed, The things lost in his keeping That he kept in his heart, These were his pilgrimage, Were his adventure, near And far, at home and in The world beyond this world.
To the abandoned fields The trees returned and grew. They stand and grow. Time comes To them, time goes, the trees Stand; the only place They go is where they are. These wholly patient ones Who only stand and wait For time to come to them, Who do not go to time, Stand in eternity.
Ask the world to reveal its quietude— not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.
The wind of the fall is here. It is everywhere. It moves every leaf of every tree. It is the only motion of the river. Green leaves grow weary of their color. Now evening too is in the air.
We come at last to the dark and enter in. We are given bodies newly made out of their absence from one another in the light of the ordinary day. We come to the space between ourselves, the narrow doorway, and pass through into the land of the wholly loved.
The light flows toward the earth, the river toward the sea, and these do not change. The air changes, as the mind changes at a word from the light, a flash from the dark.
this is the river of the birth of my mind and inspiration, my watching many years here where I have made my toils. And now I must imagine it rising, light drawn, invisibly up into the air.
Leave your windows and go out, people of the world, go into the streets, go into the fields, go into the woods and along the streams. Go together, go alone. Say no to the Lords of War which is Money which is Fire. Say no by saying yes
to the air, to the earth, to the trees, yes to the grasses, to the rivers, to the birds and the animals and every living thing, yes to the small houses, yes to the children. Yes.
In sleep The dreamer wakes. He sees Above the stars the deep Of Heaven opened. Is
He living, then, his part Of Heaven’s earthly life? And what shall be the art By which this sight can live?
They come singly, the little streams, Out of their solitude. They bear In their rough fall a spate of gleams That glance and dance in morning air. They come singly, and coming go Ever downward toward the river Into whose dark abiding flow They come, now quieted, together. In dark they mingle and are made At one with light in highest flood Embodied and inhabited, The budded branch as red as blood.
The window again welcomes in the light of lengthening days. The river in its old groove passes again beneath opening leaves. In their brevity, between cold and shade, flowers again brighten the woods floor. This then may be the prayer without ceasing, this beauty and gratitude, this moment.
I built a timely room beside the river, The slope beneath descending to the water. Some mornings it is vibrant with the glance Of sunlight brightened on the little waves The wind drives shoreward, stirring leaves and branches Over the roof also. It is a room Of pictures and of memories of some Who are no more in time, and of the absent And of the present the unresting thoughts. It is a room as timely as the body, As frail, to shelter love’s eternal work, Always unfinished, here at water’s edge, The work of beauty, faith, and gratitude Eternally alive in time.
Camp Branch, my native stream, forever unreturning flows from the town down to Cane Run which flows to the river. It is my native descent, my native walk, my native thought that stays and goes, passing ever downward toward the sea. Its sound is a song that flings up light to the undersides of leaves. Its song and light are a way of walking, a way of thought moved by sound and sight.
Nature of course includes damage as a part of her wholeness. Her creatures live only by the deaths of other creatures. Wind, flood, and fire are as much her means of world-making as birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay. She destroys and she heals. Her ways are cyclic, but she is absolutely original. She never exactly repeats herself, and this is the source equally of our grief and our delight. But Nature’s damages are followed by her healings, though not necessarily on a human schedule or in human time.
That one is sometimes able, among the disturbances of the present world, to wander into some good and beautiful whereabouts of the woods, grow quiet, and come to rest is a gift, a wonder, and a kind of grace.
He is a tree of a sort, rooted in the dark, aspiring to the light, dependent on both. His poems are leavings, sheddings, gathered from the light, as it has come, and offered to the dark, which he believes must shine with sight, with light, dark only to him.
He sets out at times without even a path or any guidance other than knowledge of the place and himself as they were in time already past. He goes among trees, climbing again the one hill of his life. With his hand full of words he goes into the wordless, wording it barely in time as he passes. One by one he places words, balancing on each as on a small stone in the swift flow
1979 I I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle. Then what is afraid of me comes and lives a while in my sight. What it fears in me leaves me, and the fear of me leaves it. It sings, and I hear its song. Then what I am afraid of comes. I live for a while in its sight. What I fear in it leaves it, and the fear of it leaves me. It sings, and I hear its song. After days of labor, mute in my consternations, I hear my song at last, and I sing it. As we sing, the day turns...
here nothing grieves In the risen season. Past life Lives in the living. Resurrection Is in the way each maple leaf Commemorates its kind, by connection Outreaching understanding. What rises Rises into comprehension And beyond. Even falling raises In praise of light. What is begun Is unfinished. And so the mind That comes to rest among the bluebells Comes to rest in motion, refined By alteration. The bud swells, Opens, makes seed, falls, is well, Being becoming what it is: Miracle and parable Exceeding thought, because it is Immeasurable; the understander Encloses understanding.
To sit and look at light-filled leaves May let us see, or seem to see, Far backward as through clearer eyes To what unsighted hope believes:
Whatever is foreseen in joy Must be lived out from day to day,
Foredooms the body to the use of light, Light into light returning, as the stream Of days flows downward through us into night, And into light and life and time to come.
The year drives on toward what it will become.
To long for what eternity fulfills Is to forsake the light one has, or wills To have, and go into the dark, to wait What light may come—no light perhaps, the dark Insinuates. And yet the dark conceals All possibilities: thought, word, and light, Air, water, earth, motion, and song, the arc Of lives through light, eyesight, hope, rest, and work—
Such a bliss Of bloom’s no ornament, but root And light, a saving loveliness, Starred firmament here underfoot.
Thrush song, stream song, holy love That flows through earthly forms and folds, The song of Heaven’s Sabbath fleshed In throat and ear, in stream and stone, A grace living here as we live, Move my mind now to that which holds Things as they change. The warmth has come. The doors have opened. Flower and song Embroider ground and air, lead me Beside the healing field that waits; Growth, death, and a restoring form Of human use will make it well. But I go on, beyond, higher In the hill’s fold, forget the time I come from and go to, recall This grove left out of all account...
Beyond all history that he knows, Where trees like great saints stand in time, Eternal in their patience.
Estranged by distance, he relearns The way to quiet not his own, The light at rest on tree and stone, The high leaves falling in their turns, Spiraling through the air made gold By their slow fall. Bright on the ground, They wait their darkening, commend To coming light the light they hold.
The sky bright after summer-ending rain, I sat against an oak half up the climb. The sun was low; the woods was hushed in shadow; Now the long shimmer of the crickets’ song Had stopped. I looked up to the westward ridge And saw the ripe October light again, Shining through leaves still green yet turning gold. Those glowing leaves made of the light a place That time and leaf would leave. The wind came cool, And then I knew that I was present in The long age of the passing world, in which I once was not, now am, and will not be, And in that time, beneath the changing tree, I rested.
Remember the small secret creases of the earth—the grassy, the wooded, the rocky—that the water has made, finding its way. Remember the voices of the water flowing. Remember the water flowing under the shadows of the trees, of the tall grasses, of the stones. Remember the water striders walking over the surface of the water as it flowed. Remember the great sphere of the small wren’s song, through which the water flowed and the light fell. Remember, and come to rest in light’s ordinary miracle.
Go by the narrow road Along the creek, a burrow Under shadowy trees Such as a mouse makes through Tall grass, so that you may Forget the wide road you Have left behind, and all That it has led to. Or, Best, walk up through the woods, Around the valley rim, And down to where the trees Give way to cleared hillside, So that you reach the place Out of the trees’ remembrance Of their kind; seasonal And timeless, they stand in Uncounted time,
Loving you has taught me the infinite longing of the self to be given away and the great difficulty of that entire giving, for in love to give is to receive and then there is yet more to give; and others have been born of our giving to whom the self, greatened by gifts, must be given, and by that giving be increased, until, self-burdened, the self, staggering upward in years, in fear, hope, love, and sorrow, imagines, rising like a moon, a pale moon risen in daylight over the dark woods, the Self whose gift we and all others are, the self that is by definition given.
Finally will it not be enough, after much living, after much love, after much dying of those you have loved, to sit on the porch near sundown with your eyes simply open, watching the wind shape the clouds into the shapes of clouds? Even then you will remember the history of love, shaped in the shapes of flesh, ever changing as the clouds that pass, the blessed yearning of body for body, unending light. You will remember, watching the clouds, the future of love.
Or I give myself to gravity, light, and air and am carried back to solitary work in fields and woods, where my hands rest upon a world unnamed, complete, unanswerable, and final as our daily bread and meat. The way of love leads all ways to life beyond words, silent and secret. To serve that triumph I have done all the rest.
Now you know the worst we humans have to know about ourselves, and I am sorry, for I know that you will be afraid. To those of our bodies given without pity to be burned, I know there is no answer but loving one another, even our enemies, and this is hard. But remember: when a man of war becomes a man of peace, he gives a light, divine though it is also human. When a man of peace is killed by a man of war, he gives a light. You do not have to walk in darkness. If you will have the courage for love, you may walk in light. It will be the light of those who have suffered for peace.
I stood still a long time for fear that any sound I made would cause that flood of light, which was singing which was light, to flow away forever from this flawed world.
There is a day when the road neither comes nor goes, and the way is not a way but a place.
There is a place you can go where you are quiet, a place of water and the light on the water. Trees are there, leaves, and the light on leaves moved by air. Birds, singing, move among leaves, in leaf shadow. After many years you have come to no thought of these, but they are themselves your thoughts. There seems to be little to say, less and less. Here they are. Here you are. Here as though gone. None of us stays, but in the hush where each leaf in the speech of leaves is a sufficient syllable the passing light finds out surpassing freedom of its way.
I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows where the rarest wildflowers are blooming, and who goes, and finds that he is smiling not by his own will.
The spring woods hastening now To overshadow him, He’s passing in to where He can’t see out. It charms Mere eyesight to believe The nearest thing not trees Is the sky, into which The trees reach, opening Their luminous new leaves. Burdened only by A weightless shawl of shade The lighted leaves let fall, He seems to move within A form unpatterned to His eye or mind, design Betokened to his thought By leafshapes tossed about. Ways indescribable By human tongue or hand Seem tangled here, and yet Are brought to light, are brought To life, and thought finds rest Beneath a brightened tree.
We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see Ahead, but looking back the very light That blinded us shows us the way we came, Along which blessings now appear, risen As if from sightlessness to sight, and we, By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward The blesséd light that yet to us is dark.
Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.
The trees rise in silence almost natural, but not quite, almost eternal, but not quite. What more did I think I wanted? Here is what has always been. Here is what will always be. Even in me, the Maker of all this returns in rest, even to the slightest of His works, a yellow leaf slowly falling, and is pleased.
When we convene again to understand the world, the first speaker will again point silently out the window at the hillside in its season, sunlit, under the snow, and we will nod silently, and silently stand and go.
The sun Comes from the dark, it lights The always passing river, Shines on the great-branched tree, And goes. Longing and dark, We are completely filled With breath of love, in us Forever incomplete.
I know for a while again the health of self-forgetfulness, looking out at the sky through a notch in the valley side, the black woods wintry on the hills, small clouds at sunset passing across. And I know that this is one of the thresholds between Earth and Heaven, from which even I may step forth from my self and be free.
Some had derided him As unadventurous, For he would not give up What he had vowed to keep. But what he vowed to keep Even his keeping changed And, changing, led him far Beyond what they or he Foresaw, and made him strange. What he had vowed to keep He lost, of course, and yet Kept in his heart. The things He vowed to keep, the things He had in keeping changed, The things lost in his keeping That he kept in his heart, These were his pilgrimage, Were his adventure, near And far, at home and in The world beyond this world.
To the abandoned fields The trees returned and grew. They stand and grow. Time comes To them, time goes, the trees Stand; the only place They go is where they are. These wholly patient ones Who only stand and wait For time to come to them, Who do not go to time, Stand in eternity.
Ask the world to reveal its quietude— not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.
The wind of the fall is here. It is everywhere. It moves every leaf of every tree. It is the only motion of the river. Green leaves grow weary of their color. Now evening too is in the air.
We come at last to the dark and enter in. We are given bodies newly made out of their absence from one another in the light of the ordinary day. We come to the space between ourselves, the narrow doorway, and pass through into the land of the wholly loved.
The light flows toward the earth, the river toward the sea, and these do not change. The air changes, as the mind changes at a word from the light, a flash from the dark.
this is the river of the birth of my mind and inspiration, my watching many years here where I have made my toils. And now I must imagine it rising, light drawn, invisibly up into the air.
Leave your windows and go out, people of the world, go into the streets, go into the fields, go into the woods and along the streams. Go together, go alone. Say no to the Lords of War which is Money which is Fire. Say no by saying yes
to the air, to the earth, to the trees, yes to the grasses, to the rivers, to the birds and the animals and every living thing, yes to the small houses, yes to the children. Yes.
In sleep The dreamer wakes. He sees Above the stars the deep Of Heaven opened. Is
He living, then, his part Of Heaven’s earthly life? And what shall be the art By which this sight can live?
They come singly, the little streams, Out of their solitude. They bear In their rough fall a spate of gleams That glance and dance in morning air. They come singly, and coming go Ever downward toward the river Into whose dark abiding flow They come, now quieted, together. In dark they mingle and are made At one with light in highest flood Embodied and inhabited, The budded branch as red as blood.
The window again welcomes in the light of lengthening days. The river in its old groove passes again beneath opening leaves. In their brevity, between cold and shade, flowers again brighten the woods floor. This then may be the prayer without ceasing, this beauty and gratitude, this moment.
I built a timely room beside the river, The slope beneath descending to the water. Some mornings it is vibrant with the glance Of sunlight brightened on the little waves The wind drives shoreward, stirring leaves and branches Over the roof also. It is a room Of pictures and of memories of some Who are no more in time, and of the absent And of the present the unresting thoughts. It is a room as timely as the body, As frail, to shelter love’s eternal work, Always unfinished, here at water’s edge, The work of beauty, faith, and gratitude Eternally alive in time.
Camp Branch, my native stream, forever unreturning flows from the town down to Cane Run which flows to the river. It is my native descent, my native walk, my native thought that stays and goes, passing ever downward toward the sea. Its sound is a song that flings up light to the undersides of leaves. Its song and light are a way of walking, a way of thought moved by sound and sight.
January 7, 2015
A little more than a decade ago I read A Timbered Choir, Berry's first collection of Sabbath Poems. They didn't stick with my quite as well as the poems in his earlier Collected Poems did, but I still gathered some favourites from them.
This is an updated collection of Sabbath poems that includes all of A Timbered Choir and more Sabbath poems written since then, up through 2012. Noticeable in this volume are Berry's reactions to the Iraq War years.
Berry's more recent poems continue his normal themes--care of the land, reflecting on marriage, criticizing our culture's faults. Added to that are ruminations on aging. I don't think that the more recent poems are as creatively powerful as the earlier ones, but they are interesting insights on life from one of our wisest people.
This is an updated collection of Sabbath poems that includes all of A Timbered Choir and more Sabbath poems written since then, up through 2012. Noticeable in this volume are Berry's reactions to the Iraq War years.
Berry's more recent poems continue his normal themes--care of the land, reflecting on marriage, criticizing our culture's faults. Added to that are ruminations on aging. I don't think that the more recent poems are as creatively powerful as the earlier ones, but they are interesting insights on life from one of our wisest people.
July 24, 2017
Peaceful, reflective, simple... all like a good Sunday in Kentucky. Berry's sabbaths make you feel as you traversed his plains, hiked in his woods, marveled at nature's dance before his eyes, all wrapped in a reverence of the creator and the occasional disdain for the created who don't share in his gratefulness of the gift of it all. His writing grows more fluid as the years traipse by and the introspection remains consistent. The imagery at times seems so tangible that the reader transports easily to the bluegrass venues that Berry celebrates with, marvels at, and speaks to.
My favorite collection was 2005.
My favorite collection was 2005.
April 24, 2015
Starting reading this on the subway; reading the introduction that said that the book is best read in a quiet place in nature. I guess the subway is the second-best place to read this book. I have had the book out in my living room, and friends who have seen it have said they want to read it. Hard to decide where to start in reading Wendell Berry - he has written so much!
March 5, 2015
This is the newest edition of Wendell Berry's poems inspired by his solitary Sunday walks around his Kentucky farm, written from 1979 to 2013. Inspirational, filled with spiritual longing, politcs, wonderings at the natural, and human, world...happy, sad, beautiul poems here. Wonderful!
July 7, 2020
Wendell Berry writes in his introduction that "the fundamental conflict of our time is that between the creaturely life of Nature’s world and the increasingly mechanical life of modern humans." Many of the poems in this collection explore this conflict, with the mechanical life of modern humans coming in for some harsh criticism. Berry also writes "that one is sometimes able, among the disturbances of the present world, to wander into some good and beautiful whereabouts of the woods, grow quiet, and come to rest is a gift, a wonder, and a kind of grace." Although a Christian (many of the poems in this collection are specifically so), this idea of the good and beautiful whereabouts of the woods constitute a Sabbath for Berry, one separate from the Sabbath where "On Sunday mornings I often attend a church in which I sometimes sat with my grandfather, in which I sometimes sit with my grandchildren, and in which my wife plays the piano. But I am a bad-weather churchgoer." Sabbath, in Berry's poetry, is to experience the nature; Sabbath is also community, love between husband and wife, family, and peace on earth, all explored in this collection of poems as well.
In this time of Trump and pandemic, and climate change, Berry is a hard read, because he constantly reminds us through his poems that we can all be doing more and should be doing more to make this world more peaceful, and protect the earth, to be good stewards. We aren't being good stewards; we worship machinery and money rather than appreciating and preserving precious Creation.
In this time of Trump and pandemic, and climate change, Berry is a hard read, because he constantly reminds us through his poems that we can all be doing more and should be doing more to make this world more peaceful, and protect the earth, to be good stewards. We aren't being good stewards; we worship machinery and money rather than appreciating and preserving precious Creation.
June 6, 2025
At long last, my journey with dear Mr. Wendell Berry has come to an end. This book is a collection of poems from 1979 to 2013 written on Sundays (aka: Sabbath). Over the course of these 30+ years, Berry criticizes the rise of industrial capitalism and its effect on the environment, reflects on the beauty of nature, mourns the loss of good friends, denounces the war efforts of the US, and contemplates his relationship to God, his farm, his family, and his own mortality. Overall, this is a 10/10 read and inspires me to become a better writer/ poet.
November 10, 2025
This collection is such a beautiful gift for him to share with us. Just as Berry suggests in his introduction, these poems call us into the world of “the natural and the supernatural, the heavenly and the earthly, the soul and the body, the wondrous and the ordinary”, as all of these “occur together in the one fabric of creation.”
Just to name a few of the best within:
The dark around us, come (47)
What do the tall trees say (113)
God, how i hate the names (275)
Learn by little the desire for all things (312)
At the woods’ edge, suddenly (363)
Just to name a few of the best within:
The dark around us, come (47)
What do the tall trees say (113)
God, how i hate the names (275)
Learn by little the desire for all things (312)
At the woods’ edge, suddenly (363)
November 4, 2021
Loved slowly reading this mammoth-sized poetry collection over the last six months! Now I feel like I can finally dive into Berry's other works, because you know I've been stockpiling his books when I find them as soon as I heard what he's about..my man!!
June 19, 2023
A profound, evocative, and compelling collection. Wendell Berry at his best across decades. I loved taking these slow, morning by morning, over several months.
April 2, 2024
This collection captures all of Berry's main themes: the land, work, spirituality, our conflict with machines, and membership. They range from lyrical to observational, from prayers to sermons.
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