Wendell Berry, Traveling at Home, with wood engravings by John DePol, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989.

Wendell Berry’s Traveling at Home is a wonderful book to read in these times when we have been kept close to home and have walked our neighborhood streets more than we normally would.  Berry’s title is oxymoronic in its way, but I think many may understand it better than we would have a couple of years ago.  Rather than traveling to see the world, we have spent a lot of time having the world come to us, even if that is simply a greater awareness of what time of year a particular tree on my street comes into bloom.

The title of the essay says much though: all the poems, as well as this essay, are walking poems.  Further, Camp Branch is a river.  So Berry’s writings here are walks through the natural world and the ruminations that come along.  In every poem, there is a solitary walker, often the narrator themselves or another seen from afar or through history.

Section Two opens with “Traveling at Home,” which presents a primary theme: “Even in a country you know by heart / it’s hard to go the same way twice (1-2).”  If we accept this premise than our homes are great places to journey around.  Walking will necessitate that the journey be close to home, for Berry adds, “To get back before dark / is the art of going (8-9).”  Berry is decisive about the journey into nature, and nowhere is this more on display than in the opening poem of Section Three, “The Bell Calls in the Town.”  In lines that sum up the ethos of these poems, Berry writes (1-6),

The bell calls in the town
Where forebears cleared the shaded land
And brought high daylight down
To shine on field and trodden road.
I hear, but understand
Contrarily, and walk into the woods.

These walks in the woods reward rereading, perhaps most of all by those of us who spend little time walking in the woods.  Berry’s language is plain and familiar; there are likely to be few words the reader does not regularly encounter.  Yet for all their plain-spokenness, these poems do not always wear their meaning on their sleeve, whether that holds true for an entire poem or a line of a poem, such as “I looked into the sky and saw the new moon (2)” from “Winter Night Poem for Mary.”  I think I have seen a new moon, but I am not entirely certain; it is a thought one has to pause upon to reckon.

The poems vary in form and length.  Some, like “Traveling at Home” and “Winter Night Poem for Mary” are short, nine lines each; others run several pages and range from fifty to seventy-five lines.  Sometimes the longer poems, such as “Creation Myth” and “Meditation in the Spring Rain,” are narrative poems, but others have a similar feel to the shorter poems.  An example of this is “The Bell Calls in the Town,” which is one of the longer poems in the collection and in my view the most formal.  As indicated in the lines quoted above, the narrator turns away from the town for the simple purpose of finding a place in the woods beyond the labors of the town and fields.  Formally, the poem is constructed with seven 10-line stanzas that have an easy-feeling rhyme scheme that may not be noticeable to the first-time reader: ABACBDCEED.  Berry avoids predictable rhymes and often uses slant rhymes (“dominion . . . upon” 34, 37; “while . . . toil” 50, 52). 

Though one of the shorter poems, “Traveling at Home” is another poem with fascinating rhymes.  There are no rhymes that match at the end of a line.  Rather one line ends with a word that rhymes or just as often slant rhymes, with a word early in the next line, usually the second word: “heart . . . hard (1-2),” “direction . . . correction (6-7),” “dark . . . art (8-9).” 

Beyond these technical features, readers will come away from this collection with a sense of Berry’s attention to the details of nature and its abiding wisdom.  Berry’s natural world is not a world of pristine virginity.  The natural world Berry explores is peopled with generations that have toiled and shaped the land, and he ascribes no inherent glory to this work.  In “History,” he writes, “I came with axe and rifle. / I came with sharp eye / and the price of land.  I came / in bondage, and I came / in freedom not worth the name (2.6-10).”  In “A Walk Down from Camp Branch,” Berry writes

And now I find an empty beer can lying in the path.  This is the track of the ubiquitous man Friday of all our woods.  In my walks I never fail to discover some sign that he has preceded me. I find his empty shotgun shells, his empty cans and bottles, his sandwich wrappings . . . He is the true American pioneer, perfectly at rest in his assumption that he is the first and the last whose inheritance and fate this place will ever be (19).

The natural world the reader finds here is not some mere pretty thing for distanced observation.  There is a pathos for people and things in these poems.  Perhaps the most compelling example comes from “The Eager Dog Lies Strange and Still,” which is a reflection on the death of a dog who was a walking companion.  The narrator misses the company of the dog, as we might suspect, but then the narrator notes the gift the dog gave in dying – a greater silence on the journey: “Though it must come by doom, / This quiet comes by kindness too (14-15).” 

The collection ends fittingly with “A Tired Man Leaves His Labor,” which ends with someone looking over a valley “at the loud / World (59-60)” and recognizes that what has been made is nothing less than home (65-68).

See further

Wendell Berry.  A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997.  New York: Counterpoint Press, 1998.