Words by Wendell Berry
Words
by Wendell Berry
By expenditure of hope,
Intelligence, and work,
You think you have it fixed.
It is unfixed by rule.
Within the darkness, all
Is being changed, and you
Also will be changed.
It may be when we no
longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
What’s funny to me is that in my poetry archives, I had this listed as a single poem, but in updating the citations for this site, I apparently braided multiple pieces together. Both pieces speak to this idea that what sometimes may look like failure is actually the doorway to other things, and there’s something about trusting the dark places. I love the line that the impeded stream is the one that sings.
The first passage — By expenditure of hope, intelligence, and work, you think you have it fixed. It is unfixed by rule. Within the darkness, all is being changed, and you also will be changed — is from his poem VII in the Sabbaths 1985 sequence, collected in A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 (Counterpoint, 1998). The Sabbath poems are Berry's sustained Sunday-walking meditations, written across decades on his Kentucky farm.
The second passage — It may be when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings — is from his essay Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms, collected in Standing by Words (North Point Press, 1983). The essay is one of his foundational pieces of literary thought.
