Hazel McKay never uses the word "peace" in the poem that carries its name. She doesn't need to. She puts a speaker outdoors, listening so closely that the listening becomes the subject. The central idea is that peace is something you notice with your senses, not an abstract concept. It is what remains when the world stops demanding anything and only the quietest sounds are left.
The opening line sets the scene plainly: "The nature around me is so still." The phrase "the nature" is slightly unusual and generic. It gives us nature as a whole rather than a particular meadow or wood. "Around me" places the speaker at the centre, surrounded rather than threatened. Then comes the poem's most deliberate moment: "I can hear..." The ellipsis and the very short line work like a held breath. The reader waits alongside the speaker, and the answer arrives at the start of the next line as a small paradox: "Nothing." Hearing nothing is the whole achievement here.
Repetition does much of the work. "Still" ends the first line and returns in the third, in "Nothing but the still, / Quietness of the world." The comma and line break pull the word away from what follows, so that "still" almost stands alone before "Quietness" arrives, slowly, in the next line. The words pile up: still, nothing, quietness, "not a sound." The poem keeps circling the same idea, like someone repeating a thing to make sure it is true. "Still" also does double duty, since it means both motionless and silent. It describes what the speaker sees and what the speaker hears in a single syllable.
The poem is in free verse, with no regular rhyme scheme and no steady metre. The lines are uneven, from the three syllables of "I can hear..." to nine in the first and sixth lines. The short lines in the middle feel hushed, almost reluctant to speak. The sixth line then stretches out: "Except the wind blowing through the leaves." Its long, unbroken run of words suits the movement it describes. There is also a faint sound-echo at the line endings. "World," "heard" and "birds" share the same vowel, and they land at the ends of lines four, five and seven. It is not rhyme exactly, but it ties the ending together the way distant sounds seem to belong to one place. The soft "s" sounds in "so still," "sound" and "soft" add a hushing effect, as if the poem were quietly asking for quiet.
The structure of the second half is interesting. "Not a sound to be heard" promises complete silence, and the next word, "Except," takes some of it back. But the exceptions are chosen with care. The wind is "blowing through the leaves," and the birds are "soft" and "chirping." Both are gentle, continuous, and entirely natural. They do not break the silence so much as define it, much as a pale shape shows up against a pale background. The passive "to be heard" helps too. Nobody is making noise at the speaker, and sounds simply exist. The imagery is almost entirely auditory, with no colours, smells or movement beyond the wind. That narrowness is a kind of instruction to the reader to close their eyes and listen.
The ending matters as well. The poem stops on "birds" without a moral or a line like "and I felt calm at last." It trusts the image to carry the feeling. Finishing on a living sound suggests that this peace is not a dead silence. It is a quiet that is still alive.
The poem's significance lies in this restraint. It is short and simple, and its language is sometimes general (the phrase "the nature" is a little vague, for instance). But it shows clearly how a poem can enact a feeling instead of naming it, using line breaks, repetition and sound to slow the reader down. It also offers a quietly persuasive idea: peace does not mean the absence of everything, but a world pared back to its softest voices.