Stay Home

I want to share a poem by Wendell Berry. It is the first one of his collection called "A Part", published in 1980. I have a copy of it that was given to my dad from his professor as a wedding present. The poem is called "Stay Home".

Stay Home

I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man's life
I am at home. Don't come with me.
You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
and then with gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don't come with me.
You stay home too.


Does this poem have any resonance with you? Berry is really a poet of the country, a farmer-poet who loves the land. Right now I am also reading a book by him called Andy Catlett: Early Travels, in which a grandfatherly voice narrates a trip he took as a nine year old boy to visit his grandparents in the fictional town of Port William. It is all about the old ways retreating under the advance of modernity, and Berry seems to me an intelligent advocate of simple conservatism - preserving a known good and settled way of life - without any of the intolerant social views associated with that term.
I remember being really impressed with an article of his that appeared in Harper's earlier in the year. It was called "Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits", a cry for us to realize and live within our limits, for example in natural resources like oil. He wants us to realize that limits are not confinements but allow for fullness of feeling, elegance, and that within the limits of, say, a small farm or a short poem, there can be inexhaustible lessons. He wants us to recognize that we live within certain self-imposed limits in society and in personal relationships - in love, in family for instance - and that our happiness and freedom lie more in this voluntary self-restraint than in the absence of any obligations or barriers to our desires.

I like this poem partly because the agrarian message does resonate a little with me. That lifestyle sometimes seems more simple, more fulfilling, more physical, more real. But I mainly like it for the sentiment of its refrain: "Don't come with me. You stay home too." While it pulls you in to his love of the country, it also pushes you away and tells you or reminds you the importance of staying with what you love.

It's interesting in this context to see how farming is treated by Thoreau. I don't know if there can be a bigger contrast. He seems to think the farmers he sees are stuck with it to their great misfortune, and it's only ignorance that keeps them toiling away:

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labour in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot!...But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and theives break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.

I think both Thoreau and Berry value nature in some sense, but it is very different between the two of them. Berry wants to participate in the land responsibly, to work in it and feel it. While Thoreau wants more to be able to wander through it freely, observe it, and let it inspire him and be a mirror for his exploration of himself. His is a more leisurely appreciation.

In the future I hope to have a post on the contrasting ideas of freedom in Berry and Thoreau - for Berry, living within the limits of place, relationships, and society and indeed seeing them as voluntary self-restraints, and then finding the inexhaustible meaning within those; for Thoreau, getting away from all relationships and obligations and experiencing true leisure and self-exploration. I'll maybe approach it through sociology and bring Nietzsche in for commentary. But right now Berry's attitude seems more mature to me, whereas Thoreau's is more extreme, Romantic, self-absorbed, and childish. It reminds me a little of how he is quoted in Into the Wild. Because of this current leaning, I'll let Mr. Berry of Kentucky have the last word, though it's not one that has to do with this particular topic. This poem is from later in that same collection, and it is called "Woods".

Woods

I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.

I like that poem, too. I'd be interested in any comments about these poems, whether you like them or don't get anything from them, as well as anything about the limits/restraints/freedom issues that I mentioned that might be relevant to a future post.