The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

"The Peace of Wild Things" is an eleven-line poem by the Kentucky farmer and writer Wendell Berry, first published in his 1968 collection Openings. It describes a man who lies awake afraid for the world and for his children's future, walks out into the night to the water where wild birds rest, and finds a peace that lasts, at least for a while.

If you've ever lain awake at 3am with your mind racing through every bad thing that might happen, this poem was written for you. We've all been there. And that's exactly why so many people keep this poem close.

Berry died on 31 August 2026, at 92, at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. His poems remain in copyright with his publisher, Counterpoint Press, so we don't reproduce the poem here. Below you'll find where to read and hear it legitimately, what it does, and why it still matters so much.

Where to Read and Hear the Poem

The poem is collected in Berry's New Collected Poems (Counterpoint Press, 2012), which gathers nearly 200 of his poems from 1964 to 2010. In the UK, Penguin also published a selection named after it, The Peace of Wild Things and Other Poems (2018).

Better still, you can hear Berry read it himself. On Being Studios has a short recording on SoundCloud: "The Peace of Wild Things" read by Wendell Berry. His slow, plain Kentucky voice is the best introduction to the poem there is. Listen to it once before you read on.

What Happens in the Poem

The first five lines are one long sentence, and they feel like a sleepless night. The speaker is overwhelmed by despair for the state of the world. The smallest sound wakes him. He's afraid of what his life, and his children's lives, might become.

Then he does something simple. He gets up, goes outside, and lies down by the water where the wild ducks spend the night. He's not there to solve anything. He's just there.

In the second half, the sentences get shorter and calmer, as if his breathing is slowing down. He notices that the wild creatures don't burden their lives by worrying about sorrows that haven't arrived. He feels the stillness of the water, and above him the stars that have been there all day, waiting for dark to show their light. And he lets himself rest, knowing the feeling won't last forever, but feeling lighter and freer while it does.

How Berry Builds That Calm

The poem is in free verse, with no regular rhyme or metre, and its line breaks follow the natural shape of the sentences. A study guide to the poem in Gale's Poetry for Students points out that it is made of five sentences that get progressively shorter and simpler. The form itself moves from a tangled, anxious mind to a calm one. You feel the change in your body as you read it.

The same guide notes a faint echo of Psalm 23, the image of being led beside still waters. But there's a twist. In the psalm, a shepherd God leads the way. In Berry's poem, the man takes himself to the water, and it is the natural world that offers the peace.

There is also a single rhyme, tying the whole thing together: the last word of the first line rhymes with the last word of the final line. Despair at the start, freedom at the end, joined by one soft sound.

What the Poem Is Really About

It's easy to read this as a pretty nature poem. It's more honest than that. Berry never says the world's problems go away. The fear is real, and it's about the future, about children, about things that haven't happened yet.

What the wild things offer is a different way of being in time.

The birds on the water live in the present. They feel what is in front of them, not what might come. For a few minutes by the water, the speaker gets to live that way too.

Berry doesn't promise permanent peace, either. The speaker knows the calm is temporary. He promises a rest.

That's what makes the poem trustworthy. It doesn't oversell.

The poem appeared in 1968, a year of war in Vietnam and of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Berry himself spoke publicly against the Vietnam War that February. So the despair in the opening line wasn't abstract. It was the news.

Who Was Wendell Berry?

Wendell Erdman Berry was born on 5 August 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky, where both sides of his family had farmed for more than a century. He studied English at the University of Kentucky, was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and taught at New York University before coming home.

In the mid-1960s he and his wife Tanya bought a hillside farm at Lane's Landing, near Port Royal, and farmed it for more than sixty years. He wrote more than fifty books of poetry, fiction and essays, many by hand in a cabin by the Kentucky River. His 1977 book The Unsettling of America became a founding text for the sustainable farming movement, and his novels, including Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter, are set in the fictional town of Port William.

He received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2011, for his achievements as a poet, novelist, farmer and conservationist. When he died this year, his family said he had been writing at his cabin until a few months before.

Why Readers Keep Returning to It

Because anxiety hasn't changed. The things that keep us awake have new names, but the feeling Berry describes in his opening line is the same one many of us know by heart. Some readers today call it eco-anxiety. Some just call it Tuesday night.

The poem gives permission to step away without pretending everything is fine. It doesn't tell you to stop caring about the world. It tells you that you're allowed to rest from carrying it, and that rest is something the world itself can give you.

Try This the Next Time You Can't Sleep

So, here's what we'd suggest. The next time worry wakes you, don't lie there arguing with it. Get up, if it's safe to, and go to the nearest bit of the natural world you can reach: a balcony, a garden, a window with a tree in it, a patch of sky.

Stay for five minutes. Find one living thing that isn't worried about tomorrow, a bird, a plant, a cat on a wall.

Then look up and find a star, or just the dark where the stars are. You don't have to fix anything tonight. You're allowed to put it down.

If you'd like another poem about finding strength in hard seasons, read our piece on "The Oak Tree". And if Berry's poem stays with you, buy his collected poems, or simply listen to him read it again. The peace is still there, waiting by the water. Rest well.