War & Peace Quote by Wendell Berry

Berry’s genius here is the way he frames escape as a kind of return: not to a fantasy, but to an older, nonverbal order where panic doesn’t get to run the show. “I come into the peace of wild things” is both confession and method. The speaker isn’t chasing joy; he’s seeking asylum from a very specific modern affliction: the mind’s compulsion to pre-live disaster. That phrase “tax their lives with forethought of grief” is a small act of moral indictment. Forethought becomes a levy, a bureaucratic extraction paid in sleep and steadiness. Wildness, by contrast, is figured as a model of attention without anxiety - not ignorance, but unburdened presence.

The subtext is political in Berry’s quiet, agrarian way. This isn’t wilderness as aesthetic backdrop; it’s an alternative value system to industrial time, where everything is forecasted, optimized, insured, and monetized. In that world, even sorrow gets pre-accounted. Berry refuses it by rehearsing a different rhythm: enter, rest, be free. “For a time” is doing crucial work: the poem doesn’t promise permanent cure, only a temporary reprieve that’s still meaningful because it restores proportion. Grace isn’t earned here; it’s ambient. “The grace of the world” suggests an economy that doesn’t keep score, where relief arrives not through self-improvement but through surrendering the fantasy of control.

Context matters: Berry wrote as a farmer-poet skeptical of American progress narratives. The line reads like an antidote to mid-to-late 20th-century acceleration, and it lands even harder now, in an age of doomscrolling and predictive dread.