Often, we want quick fixes. We live in the tyranny of the present moment, and it’s hard for us to take a long-term view of history and our own moment within it. Most things take time—especially good things, like restorations and healing and growth. But we become impatient. We want results now. We lose hope.

It is this feeling to which the great writer and agrarian Wendell Berry provides an antidote in his poem “A Vision.”

Berry has set himself apart as one of the most insightful critics of the industrialization of agriculture and how that process has devasted the health of our bodies, communities, and the earth itself. In this poem, however, he turns away from criticizing the present to imagine a better future, taking care to remind us that we may not live to see this restoration of culture and agriculture, but that it is well worth working for nonetheless.

The poem begins:

If we will have the wisdom to survive,

to stand like slow-growing trees

on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,

if we make our seasons welcome here,

asking not too much of earth or heaven,

then a long time after we are dead

the lives our lives prepare will live

here, their houses strongly placed

upon the valley sides, fields and gardens

rich in the windows.

Berry chooses to write in free verse (no rhyme or meter), but that doesn’t mean there is no pattern or thought behind the poem’s form. The long series of phrases and clauses punctuated by commas and line breaks establishes the slow, meditative mood of the poem. Each image is held up before us separately to be admired and concentrated on: “To survive … slow-growing trees … a ruined place, renewing … long after we are dead … their houses strongly placed.” The repetition of “lives” and “live” in line 7 emphasizes the rebirth that the poet envisions.

The importance of rootedness is a recurring theme in Berry’s work, and we see that reflected in the imagery of the “slow-growing tree,” which finds its echo in “houses strongly placed.” For Berry, a healthy human society is “strongly placed” or rooted in its local environment, with local memory, stories, lore, and community. It’s like a tree, drawing nourishment from the soil of the past while growing upward into the sky of the future.

Berry continues with his vision of this future:

The river will run

clear, as we will never know it,

and over it, birdsong like a canopy.

On the levels of the hills will be

green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.

The lines about the river are some of the most poignant. Berry alludes to the fact that many of our waterways are muddy and chemical-filled due to erosion and pesticide run-off from irresponsible modern agricultural methods. I recently toured a state fish hatchery and learned that in many of my state’s waterways, the fish simply can’t be a self-sustaining population anymore because of the water pollution, and so they have to be restocked constantly by the hatcheries.

So yes, our waters have been fouled—both the literal waters of our streams and the figurative waters of our philosophy, education, art, and so on. Relativism has muddled many minds. We have lost clarity, certainty, a recognition of objective truth.

But Berry believes clarity may come again, although we may not live to see it. Here again, he reminds us that we must be patient and our fight today is, perhaps, less on our own behalf than on the behalf of future generations—generations who might not even know our names. What we are doing in the work of cultural restoration is offering a gift across the centuries, a gift to people as yet unborn. These generations will see “On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down / the old forest, an old forest will stand, / its rich leaf-fall drifting its roots. / The veins of forgotten springs will have / opened.”

Here, we might think again in both literal and figurative terms. Figuratively, the trees are the trees of tradition, cut down needlessly. Berry emphasizes this rupture with a line break after “down.” The springs may be the long-neglected springs of wisdom and beauty found in the Western heritage, ready to slake our thirst.

Berry continues:

Families will be singing in their fields.

In the voices they will hear a music

risen out of the ground. They will take

nothing from the ground they will not

return,

whatever the grief at parting.

These lines are a kind of answer to another vision that Berry pictured in his nonfiction book The Unsettling of America, one dominated by agribusiness and technocracy. In this darker vision, all aspects of human life will be compartmentalized, separated and subjected to the authority of “experts.” This is how Berry describes it:

There are several things that people will not be free to do in the nation-of-the-future that will be fed by these farms-of-the-future. They will not live where they work or work where they live. They will not work where they play. And they will not, above all, play where they work. There will be no singing in those fields … because, in the first place, the fields will be ugly, all graces of nature having been ruled out, and, in the second place, they will be dangerous.

In Berry’s view, the lack of song in the farm-fields of the future (and largely the present) epitomizes the dehumanization caused by industrial agriculture. The joyous superfluity of song, of art, of laughter—these are distinctly human traits. These are things done for their own sake, not for some pragmatic end. But the technocratic future here described belongs not to humans. It belongs to pragmatism and to machines. And machines do nothing superfluous.

So in this poem, then, Berry is presenting a rival future, a future that is still possible depending on what is done in the present. And that future is characterized by song—which is to say, by everything that makes human life worth living, everything that makes us us. The reintegration of work, play, and family life is possible.

The next section of the poem addresses the centrality of memory in this renewed future. “Memory, / native to this valley, will spread over it / like a grove, and memory will grow / into a legend, legend into song, song / into sacrament.” If our age is characterized by a great and miasmic amnesia—a forgetting of history, of the values of tradition, of the common threads that run through all the ages—this future Berry hopes for will be characterized by memory, another distinctly human trait. An awareness of the past helps us escape the tyranny of the present as much as a sense of our responsibility to the future does. Berry combines both in this poem.

He concludes:

The abundance of this

place,

the songs of its people and its birds,

will be health and wisdom and indwelling

light. This is no paradisal dream.

Its hardship is its possibilities.

The final lines ring out with a note of both hope and challenge. Every worthwhile thing requires effort, “hardship.” But the hardship is a guarantee, so to speak, of the reality of the vision. Pure fantasies bring no hardship; they remain theoretical, impossible. They demand nothing of us. But Berry suggests here that his vision is not a fantasy. Therefore, it will require something of us. It will require patience and generosity, as we may not be the primary recipients of the benefits of our work. It will be a gift.

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Image credit: public domain