by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
The above illustration was in a poster advertising a biological exhibition at the zoo in The Hague from June 11-21, 1910. It was produced by printamaker Theodorus van Hoytema (1863–1917), and originally found on Wikimedia. My digitally enhanced version of the painting can be downloaded as an 11” x 7” @ 300 ppi JPEG here.
Digitally enhanced reproductions of public domain fine art are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.