Thursday
I’m sure I am just one of thousands of Wendell Berry fans whose minds automatically went to “Testament” upon hearing of his death. I also imagine the poem will be read at his funeral since he tells us how we are to respond. Attuned as he was to nature and nature’s rhythms, he expands our ideas of what is possible.
“Don’t call it death,” he writes. Instead, “say that my flesh/ Has a perfect compliance with the grass/ Truer than any it could have striven for.”
By merging with the earth, he goes on to explain, he is on his way to his roots (in all senses of the word). That earth, after all,
has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes.
The earth, he later tells us, has freedom and changeability so it’s okay to be one with it.
Testament
By Wendell BerryAnd now to the Abyss I pass
Of that Unfathomable Grass…
1.
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don’t call it death —
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer than any it could have striven for.
You will recognize the earth in me, as before
I wished to know it in myself: my earth
That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes. Say that I have found
A good solution, and am on my way
To the roots. And say I have left my native clay
At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.
Traveler to where? Say you don’t know.
He addresses where his spirit will travel in part 2, asking us not to predict “anything too final.” After all, “whatever is unsure is possible, and life is bigger than flesh.” Therefore, we are to let our imaginations reach beyond thought and figure our hope. “Why settle/ For some know-it-all’s despair,” he cautions, “When the dead may dance to the fiddle.”
2.
But do not let your ignorance
Of my spirit’s whereabouts dismay
You, or overwhelm your thoughts.
Be careful not to say
Anything too final. Whatever
Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger
Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought
Let imagination figure
Your hope. That will be generous
To me and to yourselves. Why settle
For some know-it-all’s despair
When the dead may dance to the fiddle
Hereafter, for all anybody knows?
And remember that the Heavenly soil
Need not be too rich to please
One who was happy in Port Royal.
I may be already heading back,
A new and better man, toward
That town. The thought’s unreasonable,
But so is life, thank the Lord!
I note in passing that, after my own son died, I imagined him dancing joyously (as was his wont) in some ethereal space. Berry would point out that I was generous to myself in so doing.
I’d be very surprised, given poem’s third section, if those in charge of his funeral will muck up his face “with wax and powder and rouge.” Nor, I suspect, will they do anything other than bury him in his work clothes and lay him out in a plain wooden box:
3.
So treat me, even dead,
As a man who has a place
To go, and something to do.
Don’t muck up my face
With wax and powder and rouge
As one would prettify
An unalterable fact
To give bitterness the lie.
Admit the native earth
My body is and will be,
Admit its freedom and
Its changeability.
Dress me in the clothes
I wore in the day’s round.
Lay me in a wooden box.
Put the box in the ground.
In the final section, the poet situates himself in his family lineage. He is off to join that “gathering of his kin,” the latest Berry to be planted in his home land. All of his forebears did “that they had to do,” he informs us before returning to the ease of the Port Royal graveyard.
4.
Beneath this stone a Berry is planted
In his home land, as he wanted.
He has come to the gathering of his kin,
Among whom some were worthy men,
Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,
But one was a cobbler from Ireland,
Another played the eternal fool
By riding on a circus mule
To be remembered in grateful laughter
Longer than the rest. After
Doing that they had to do
They are at ease here. Let all of you
Who yet for pain find force and voice
Look on their peace, and rejoice.
Or as he puts it in another poem, he has “come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” He can now truly say, “I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
