The Late Light: A tribute to long marriage in memory of Wendell Berry
My wife and I celebrated 19 years of marriage this week. Wendell Berry, the writer-farmer from Kentucky, passed away on Monday after 69 years of marriage to his wife, Tanya. Through more than 50 books, Berry will be principally remembered as a champion of sustainable agriculture and a fierce cultural critic. Yet, I offer a couple of examples of his love poems.
In my dog-eared, much-underlined copy of The Peace of Wild Things, Berry compared his beloved to “a wild rose blooming at the edge of thicket, grace and light where yesterday was only shade.” But his poems were not about puppy love: “How joyful to feel the heart quake,” he wrote, “at the sight of a grandmother … beautiful in her blue robe!” I love that poem’s exclamation point!
In another poem, he saw his wife “white-haired among the green leaves, picking the ripe raspberries.” Hers is like “the late light [that] moves in beauty through the living woods.”
With the passage of time comes wisdom, such as this line: “In love to give is to receive, and then there is yet more to give.” Any loving relationship is about compromise and sacrifice (“yet more to give”).
Berry also acknowledges that the passage of time confronts us with death. Another poem exclaims, “How many we know by now who are dead!” Though I am only in midlife, I can relate. Much of Berry’s work meditates on the reality of death, and yet he rarely broods. He grieves. He feels that loss may provide an opportunity for gratitude: “What are we but welcomers of that ancient joy, always coming, always passing?”
There is a poignant poem about an elderly couple: “They sit together on the porch, the dark almost fallen.” At the end of their lives, the couple has simplified their possessions to just two sets of dishes. They sit in quiet rest. Berry wrote, “They have one mind between them.” The simplicity of that phrase conveys such tenderness. And yet, for all they know of each other, neither knows who will die, “[going] first through the dark doorway,” while the other “sits on a while alone.”
Wendell Berry has died. I lift a prayer of gratitude for his life and one asking for comfort for Tanya. Give him the last words: “I see you leaving our bright land, the last cut flowers in your hand.”
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of the book with Wipf and Stock Publishers titled This Is the Day: A Year of Observing Unofficial Holidays about Ampersands, Bobbleheads, Buttons, Cousins, Hairball Awareness, Humbugs, Serendipity, Star Wars, Teenagers, Tenderness, Walking to School, Yo-Yos, and More. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where he is a student of joy.
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