Despair and peace in poetry
For me, poetry and the natural world go hand in hand. Poetry gives us humans a way of approaching the essence of things in the world around us and our relationship with it that can’t be captured in language ruled by grammar and conventional rules of meaning. Poetry comes from a freer place that seems able to tap into deeper meanings, make unexpected connections and potentially overturn oppressive norms.
A poem rooted in its time of political turmoil
Here, I’d like to share some thoughts on Wendell Berry’s poem, The Peace of Wild Things, and how you might interact with the poem’s lines to find the peace of wild things yourself.
Berry’s words seem just as relevant to us today as to the time in which they were written in the 1960s, amid the Cold War and conflict in Vietnam. Today, many of us feel similar ‘despair’ at what is going on around us in the world. War. Violence. Genocide. Hate. Intolerance. Destruction of the world which is our only home.
The poem doesn’t brush these things under the carpet and ignore them. It speaks of fear for the future, fear over what the lives of today’s children will be like. It recognises the ‘grief’ that comes with living in this world.
And a poem rooted in other-than-human nature
It also offers a place of healing. Not to escape or hide from what is going on, but to give ourselves ‘rest’, a necessary respite.
Today, we might talk about the effects on our nervous systems. That we cannot live well or work for what matters to us if we are on constant high alert.
I love the image of ‘still water’ and the idea of being in its presence - the pool itself as a living entity we can relate to. This feels like an animistic way of seeing the world around us in which everything has ‘spirit’, not just humans and animals, but also mountains, rivers, whole landscapes.
It’s quite a cognitive jolt to come to the realisation that even in daylight the stars are shining above us, a constant in the context of our lifetimes. A sudden shift of perspective.
Where is your ‘still water’?
So where is your place of ‘still water’? A place to feel that peace and to truly rest. A place of freedom.
Or the place or natural phenomenon that gives you that sudden shift of perspective between human time and space and the vastness of the universe in which we live?
This might be somewhere you know, or somewhere in the imagination. Can you bring it to mind and visualise every detail - not just what you can see but the feel of the air on your skin, the scents, the sounds?
You might like to describe it in writing - prose or poetry, journaling, mind-mapping, or speaking it into your phone - whatever works for you. And see where loosening up the rules of grammar, of sentence structure and spelling might take you.
Join me for more like this
I’m launching Words for Wellbeing in March 2026. In-person in Runcorn on Tuesday 10th and online using Google Meet on Tuesday 17th.
A small, friendly writing group of no more than 8 participants, focused on writing for self-expression, self-exploration and self-understanding.
We’ll meet monthly and we’ll often take our inspiration from the natural world and from poems like this one.
Full details of this and booking (with a reduced rate if you’re on a low income) is at Eventbrite: in person or online.
Drop me a line at janinecounsellor@gmail.com if there’s anything else you’d like to know about it.