The Peace of Wild Things is one of the most celebrated poems of Wendell Berry, a renowned American poet, novelist, essayist, and farmer. The poem perfectly captures the poet’s reverence for nature and the solace it brings. The poet stresses the chaos and anxieties of human life in the poem and compares it to the tranquility found in the natural world.
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.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.