Analysis of “Februray 2, 1968”
  A Poem by Wendell Berry

February 2, 1968

In the darkness of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

- Wendell Berry

With only a date for a title, the poem invites contemplation about a particular moment in time. Anyone who remembers 1968 will suspect the poem is about trouble. During 1968 the Tet Offensive changed America’s attitude toward the Vietnam War; an incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, announced he would not seek re-election; Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were gunned down in public; and 12,000 police and 15,000 army regulars and National Guardsmen bloodily suppressed rioters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Trouble was everywhere, and the country seemed to be coming apart.

The day, February 2, calls to mind Groundhog Day-suggesting that the title might be intended symbolically-suggesting an ambiguous turning point, a day when we can hope the worst is over. But maybe not.

The poem begins with confirmation that it is, indeed, about trouble, a gathering of dark forces: the barren, snowswept imagery of night and winter, the swinging anapestic rhythm accelerated almost at once with quick iambs, the somber tone sustained through the final words: “dead of winter.”

The second line switches to a faster, more urgent trochaic rhythm, hard and driving, ratcheting up the pace and creating anticipation as the imagery becomes more strident, winter turning into war, militant “r” sounds harshly echoing and amplifying “winter” with a slant-rhyme: “danger.”

In two brief lines, the poet establishes a dark and troubled world with danger on the rise. Having been drawn into a sense of accelerating trouble, both in the imagery and in the rhythm, the reader expects the rising crescendo to continue, leading to fireworks of some sort in the final line.

But it doesn’t happen. Instead, the poet shifts to an iambic rhythm, the most natural rhythm in English-the basic rhythm of everyday speech. Everything relaxes. Disaster is averted, normalcy returns, and images of winter and war fade into an image of an ordinary springtime routine. The ominous sounds of “winter” and “danger” are transformed subtly into the green freshness of “clover.” Spring has arrived. In some sense, the world is in order.

Given what went before, a world of winter and war, is this enough? Is the poet’s response to the troubled world strong enough? Is his action-to be out planting clover-an adequate answer to the desolate world in which he lives?

There is more, of course. It isn’t a fertile field that he plants, but a rocky hillside, perhaps ruined by the short-sighted, abusive practices that Berry so eloquently laments in other writings. And he plants clover, a nitrogen-fixer that restores fertility to exhausted land. He isn’t merely doing spring planting, he is healing a place where life is hard because of neglect and shoddy work.

In a troubled world, he adopts a local focus: repairing his little bit of the earth and planting for the future, keeping the basic work of peace going. He tends to his own affairs, making his place more abundant, more beautiful, more productive. Is it enough?

I suppose we make our own answers, but for me the answer is “yes.” One response sane and intelligent response to trouble is to abandon trouble’s strident tones and rhythms, to leave the urge for a quick resolution which, in being quick, is bound to be violent.

Sometimes, taking a longer view and changing the rhythm is precisely the best we can do.