Wendell Berry: Collected Poems

I finished my first reading of Collected Poems 1957-1982 this morning. I was given this book seven years ago by a friend who still a regular part of my life. It was at my 30th birthday party. In the inside cover I wrote down all the names of the people who came to my party. I can still look over this list and remember how much I enjoyed that part.

However, there is also some sadness, as the great majority of those who attended I have lost all contact with. There are circumstances that explain this happening to some extent, but it is decidedly foreign to the world that Berry commends to us in these poems. There are many poems in this collection that are important to me. I will touch on two:

This is from At a Country Funeral:

But our memory of ourselves, hard earned,

is one of the land's seeds, as a seed

is the memory of the life of its kind in its place,

to pass on into life the knowledge

of what has died. What we owe the future

is not a new start, for we can only begin

with what has happened. We owe the future

the past, the long knowledge

that is the potency of time to come.

That makes a man's grave a rich furrow.

The community of knowing in common is the seed

of our life in this place. There is not only

no better possibility, there is no

other, except for chaos and darkness,

the terrible ground of the only possible

new start.

This idea of valuing the past, of needing it almost logically if we are to go on living here in this place (vs. chaos and darkness) stands out as something missing in the "space age" or "mobile age", etc. And it seems to describe the burdens and struggles as we do enter into the chaos called novelty. I deeply want to understand my past and the people who have gone before me, literally my ancestors as well as the events of our nation that has led us to this moment. And I also want to enter my grave as a rich furrow for my own children, if that can be.

From the poem Rising:

The boy must learn the man

whose life does not travel

along any road, toward

any other place,

but is a journey back and forth

in rows, and in the rounds

of years. His journey's end

is no place of ease, but the farm

itself, the place day labor

starts from, journeys in,

returns to: the fields

whose past and potency are one.

Though I will not be a farmer and must journey mostly on keys and through number fields, beneath this surface is a view of the world. This is from his collection called Wheel where he allows the story of progress (the idea of linear growth, often attributed to the west and founded in the Christian story) to come into conflict with the older idea of a wheel of life or a circle/cycle of seasons (also deeply embedded in the Christian story). Do we see our life as an epic journey, onward and upward or do we see it in the domestic reality of "back and forth"? Do we see retirement as the goal, the life of ease or does work and domestic life dwell together?