The Country of Marriage by Wendell Berry

First published: 1971; collected in The Country of Marriage, 1973

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“The Country of Marriage” is a pastoral lyric in free verse with seventy-eight lines and seven irregular stanzas. The title suggests the poem’s dual celebration of country life and marriage. Both farming and marriage are valued as complementary expressions of love, fidelity, trust, and commitment. The poem is written in the first person, using the Berry persona of the “Mad Farmer,” who reflects Berry’s agrarian perspective. It is implicitly addressed to Berry’s wife, Tanya, as a love poem, though she is not named directly but addressed throughout the poem in the second person.

As a poem about courtship, marriage, and the married life, “The Country of Marriage” echoes the form and sentiments of Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion” (epithalamion means “wedding song or poem”). Berry, however, forsakes Spenser’s classical allusions in favor of pastoral images drawn directly from the Berrys’ marriage and life together on their Kentucky farm.

Stanza 1 opens with a dream: The speaker envisions his wife “walking at night along the streams/ of the country of my birth,” merged with the forces of nature, “holding in your body the dark seed of my/ sleep.” This discreetly eroticized dream of love and procreation sets their conjugal love within the context of the wider reproductive powers of nature.

Stanza 2 contrasts the security of their union with the prior loneliness and isolation of the speaker, who depicts himself as “a man lost in the woods in the dark,” a wanderer who has lost his way and seeks “the solace of his native land.” Berry’s persona finds reassurance in his wife’s words in a dream that he did not know he had dreamed, “like the earth’s empowering brew rising/ in root and branch.” Their life together reminds the speaker of a clearing in the forest, revealing a well-tended farm, with orchard, garden, and bright flowers. The pastoral images in stanza 3 reinforce the connection between country and marriage. Images of light and dark also dominate in this stanza, the light in the clearing accentuated by the darkness of the surrounding forest.

Stanza 4 reveals a pattern of the speaker launching out and returning to the emotional comfort of their relationship, filled with joy, surrendering and trusting to their love like a man venturing into “the forest unarmed.” Images of descent, arrival, and rest suggest the pleasures of their love. In stanza 5 the poet affirms that the bond of their love surpasses a mere economic exchange: It is rich and limitless in its possibilities for their mutual growth and development. Again, his wife serves as a guide and source of support. The speaker stresses his unworthiness and affirms the blessedness of their union as an unearned gift, to be accepted as the plants accept “the bounty of the/ light.”

What their love has taught him, the poet affirms in stanza 6, is the freedom of surrender to its bounty, as conveyed by the simile of their drinking the waters of a deep stream whose richness surpasses their thirst. Berry’s water images imply the freedom, surrender, and trust essential to love. The last stanza unifies the images of light and darkness, water and rain, and flowers, orchards, and abundance in the promise of the marriage that they have “planted in this ground.” The poet closes by praising his wife as a type of “all beautiful and honest women that you gather to/ yourself.”

Forms and Devices

“The Country of Marriage” is the title poem of Berry’s fourth poetry volume, which was dedicated to his wife Tanya. Each of the seven stanzas is organized around a series of metaphoric assertions of the poet’s love for his wife. Berry, like Denise Levertov, is committed to the use of organic form, in which the content of a poem shapes its form. Berry’s use of the confessional form also allows him to celebrate their conjugal love in a personal but discreet manner.

Each stanza opens with a poetic assertion or question which is then expanded through the use of a dominant metaphor, linking their love with nature. The delicacy and intimacy of the lines create a sense of rhetorical privacy, as in a love letter or courtship poem. The basic movement of each stanza is from separation and isolation to union, from dream and desire to surrender and union. The organic metaphors express a series of oppositions that convey the richness of their love: limited/limitless, known/unknown, possessed/unpossessed, worthy/unworthy, light/darkness, life/ death.

Another dominant trope for their love is expressed through the words trust, approach, surrender, descent, union, rest, and peace, which echo the Elizabethan conceit of “dying” into each other’s love, often found in courtly love poetry. The energy of the poem seems to alternate between separation and union, losing and finding each other, suggesting the task of finding and defining oneself through love. There is a sense of indirect erotic tension and energy diffused throughout the poem, conveyed through the organic metaphors, which parallels the fecundity of nature.

The speaker celebrates the joy, happiness, and fulfillment of their marriage, always from the speaker’s own point of view. His wife is addressed but never replies. The poem also conveys a tacit religious sensibility, reminiscent of St. Paul’s celebration of love in I Corinthians 13, in that the qualities of conjugal love—its paradoxical, mysterious, generous, unpredictable, unbounded, and transcendent nature—suggest a parallel with divine love. A husband’s and wife’s love for each other mirrors God’s love for humanity. These religious overtones are implied through Berry’s consistent use of light and dark imagery throughout the poem.

Bibliography

Cornell, Robert. “The Country of Marriage: Wendell Berry’s Personal Political Vision.” Southern Literary Review 16 (Fall, 1983): 59-70.

Ditsky, John. “Wendell Berry: Homage to the Apple Tree.” Modern Poetry Studies 2, no. 1 (1971): 7-15.

Freyfogle, Eric. “The Dilemma of Wendell Berry.” University of Illinois Law Review 1994 (2): 363-385.

Hass, Robert. “Wendell Berry: Finding the Land.” Modern Poetry Studies 2, no. 1 (1971): 16-38.

Hicks, Jack. “Wendell Berry’s Husband to the World: A Place on Earth.” American Literature 51 (May, 1979): 238-254.

Merchant, Paul, ed. Wendell Berry. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1991.

Morgan, Speer. “Wendell Berry: A Fatal Singing.” Southern Review 10 (October, 1974): 865-877.

Nibbelink, Herman. “Thoreau and Wendell Berry: Bachelor and Husband of Nature.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 84 (Spring, 1985): 127-140.

Pevear, Richard. “On the Prose of Wendell Berry.” Hudson Review 35 (Summer, 1982): 341-347.

Smith, Kimberly K. Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003.

Smith, Kimberly K. “Wendell Berry’s Feminist Agrarianism.” Women’s Studies 30 (2001): 623-646.