Nature writing is historically a place for poets and thinkers to come to terms with what nature asks of them and society demands of them. Wendell Berry is among many writers who wrote from this fraught place, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and others. Wendell Berry used poetry to speak back against the disembodiment of the urbanized world. His poetry was a way to return attention back to the wilderness where, without the constraints of human judgment and system, one can hopefully find freedom and peace.
Though Wendell Berry is not a self-identified queer poet, the issues and desires he expresses in his poem “The Peace of Wild Things”, 1968, are synonymous with the struggle many LGBTQ+ writers express, as they seek to comprehend queer identity and regain that free and embodied state of being that capitalist society denies them. This intersection of the nature writer’s desires and the queer person’s desires show how ultimately wilderness is not only a place under our feet that will allow us freedom if we just let ourselves notice and tend to it, but that at the same time the wilderness is also our body, and it is ultimately our bodies that we want to be free with.
In his poem “The Peace of Wild Things” Wendell Berry condemns the industrial world and the negative effects it has on him. The piece begins with:
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, (Berry, 1-3)
He describes the juxtaposition of nature and the urbanized world clearly in this moment of sudden wakefulness, where the night has “least sound”. “Sound” infers the constant thrum of the metropolis, and in a night where there is “least” of it, Berry immediately puts us in the peace of wilderness. In nature’s stillness he is able to hear his inner fears “of what my life and children’s lives may be”, and realize the instability of his identity as determined by “the world”. The word “world” has colonial roots that reference the broad and man-made creation of “new worlds” and “better worlds”. The way we see Berry setting himself apart from the “sound” and the “world” and the “lives” that may be if he was to identify himself with the urban life, is his first step in becoming free of it. The stillness of the night is allowing him to realize he must seek freedom. His allowance of the internal voice is an early stage of embodiment.
Berry is able to seek freedom through peaceful embodiment in nature—nature being the only place he knows of where “man” cannot tread or spy. We see this freedom in the lines:
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. (Berry, 4-5)
To “lie down” is an act of vulnerability, a submission to his environment, and a submission to the state of his body. He is not fighting himself or “the world” anymore, he is allowing himself to rest in the safety of nature like the wood drake does “rest[ing] … his beauty on the water”. Describing this “rest” as “beautiful” shows us Berry thinks higher of nature and what nature gives us, than what “the world” is meant to give us. The line ending with “the great heron feeds”, shows a pride and necessity in giving yourself to nature, tending to your body, giving it sustenance, and allowing yourself to be beautiful by your own standard, and not because “the world” is watching.
Berry was influenced by the nature writers that came before him, such as the aforementioned Emerson and Thoreau, who originally questioned the oppressive conventions society was emphasizing as industrialism boomed and capitalism took off. These writers and those who came after them all sought to address the gap being enforced between Nature (and the nature of the individual), and Society. In the essay “Frost as Virile Poet: The Queer Politics of Heterosexuality” Edward J. Ingebretsen writes about this separation: “The crisis of conventionality at the turn of the century and beyond was vectored through the binaries of gender. This resulted in a fissuring of action, public life, rhetoric and politics from [so] called private spheres of sensibility and passivity.” (Ingebretsen, 57). Not only was this “crisis of conventionality” uprooting people from their individuality and sweeping them into a mainstream way of life, but it punished those who tried to stay separate. For example, the oppression queer people faced (and still face) forced them to change or mask themselves to fit a construct of “normal” that produces disembodiment and disconnect from their roots—both Mother Earth, and the wilderness of their individuality. The desires for physical and emotional freedom expressed in “The Peace of Wild Things” are inherently queer desires. Berry writes about needing nature in order to get back to the “roots” of true being in the lines:
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. (Berry, 6-8)
By describing “wild things” with the word “peace” Berry is taking back the negative connotations the urban world assigns to the word “wild” such as immoral and savage. These negative words have been applied to queerness in the same way they have been applied to wilderness.
Berry is reclaiming “wild” as something that gives us balance, and brings us into ourselves, and thus gives us peace; in the same way a queer person would reclaim their own “wild” queer identity in order to find balance and peace. Berry states that these “wild things” are not full of burdens and “forethought” and misery, unlike the world tells us. These negatives are contrasted with wild things to tell us more about “the world” in which Berry is distancing himself from. As Berry distances himself from society and its “taxes”, as a queer person often must when coming to terms with their identity, Berry becomes present. Presentness is evoked by how he comes “into the presence of still water”, most notably because “still water” is reflective, implying by coming into its presence, he is also coming into his own presence.
Kelly Baker also talks about nature, or rurality, as a space for coming to terms with self, and recognizing identity. In her essay “Conceptualizing Rural Queerness and Its Challenges for the Politics of Visibility” she writes: “…rurality as an often- ignored yet immensely pervasive thread of identity, which is absent from hegemonic, and I would add, urban, conceptualizations of queer visibility.” (Kelly, 39) Being visible to ourselves as a key component to realizing identity (versus society’s ability to visualize us) is a vivid concept in the above lines six through eight of Berry’s poem. The stillness of the water before him implies no one else is there: just his reflection, as nature interprets it, and it is more pervasive than any of the “despair” and “grief” he was given from urbanized society.
“The Peace of Wild Things” is a crossroads, where the tormented desires of a cis-het person who wants to find himself in nature, are synonymous with desires of the oppressed queer person to find themself outside society’s rules. Both intersect under one purpose: to be free in their bodies, to find the peace in the freedom of being individuals in nature—the earth whom we will return to, a safe haven that does not judge and has no trajectory except for us to grow with it like the trees and vines and creeks do, transcending boundaries and shamelessly following the lead of our own footsteps. We see these themes in the final lines of Berry’s poem:
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. (Berry, 9-11)
This is the first “I feel” in the whole poem, here Berry has finally embraced embodiment, and by feeling the stars’ blindness to the day, he identifies with them. “Day” here seems in reference to the work day, or the time to be out in the world, a time of being seen. Being blind to the day is an oasis he rests in and “the world” which he wrote of with so much pain before suddenly becomes full of grace, he is granted freedom. By following his truth and listening to his desires, he is able to transform his experience of the world. Despite the “day” still existing, he has found a way to feel blind to it, and to rest.
Ingrid Mao shows the writing lineage Wendell Berry follows when he turns to nature in times of despair, in her article “Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Relationship Between Nature and the Self”. Mao writes: “It is only when recognize our own constitution in — and seek communion with — Nature can we partake in a catharsis that purges the Soul of dross and thus brings us back to a pure state of being, akin to that of the child, which precedes the contamination of our consciousness by age, experience, and society.” (Mao, 1) As Mao shows, Emerson’s theories describe nature as a healing force that brings people back from the damage of mainstream conventions. “The Peace of Wild Things” also demonstrates a way to live true to yourself with nature’s help, thus simultaneously developing a relationship to the body founded on total freedom, a freedom which society will not let us have.
“The Peace of Wild Things” continues a tradition of nature writing as a way to disrupt societal convention and return to oneself. The survival-motivated need to recognize oneself despite the terms of a restrictive society has been a prominent theme throughout queer history, and Wendell Berry’s poem explicitly addresses this theme. Despite not using queer-specific language “The Peace of Wild Things” provides a unifying common ground where all of us desperate to be with our freest and unburdened self, can finally rest.
Works Cited
Baker, Kelly. “Conceptualizing Rural Queerness and Its Challenges for the Politics of Visibility.” Platforum, vol. 12, 2011.
Berry, Wendell. The Peace of Wild Things and Other Poems. London, Penguin Books, 2018.
Ingebretsen, Edward J. “Frost as Virile Poet: The Queer Politics of Heterosexuality.” The Robert Frost Review, no. 11, 2001, pp. 51–69. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24727316. Accessed 24 Apr. 2025.
Mao, Ingrid. “Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Relationship Between Nature and the Self.” The Burgmann Journal, no. 5, studentjournals.anu.edu.au/index.php/burgmann/article/view/63. Accessed 3 May 2025.
Sprockets and Springes 