By Danny Heitman
Don’t judge Poems of Gratitude by its cov-
er. The dust jacket of Everyman’s Library’s
anthology of poetry about thankfulness
has a distinctly autumnal theme, with lots
of earth tones and a sumptuous feast on
the front and a snowbound scene featuring
turkeys on the back. Despite its nod toward
November and Thanksgiving, though, the
collection’s abiding message is that
gratitude isn’t merely about bowing
one’s head over a holiday table. The poems
here honor gratitude throughout the year,
and their themes extend into every season.
The book includes “The Summer Day,”
for example, an iconic poem by Mary Oliver.
Instructively, the poem doesn’t include the
words “thanks” or “gratitude.” Oliver reflects
on the subject more circumspectly:I don’t know exactly what a
prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down
in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to
stroll through
the fields,
which is what I’ve been doing all
day.
Tell me, what else should I have
done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and
too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious
life?In Oliver’s vision, gratitude becomes
something more than a passive piety. The
poem’s reference to death underscores the
sense of loss that makes life itself such a
wonder worthy of thanks. “The Summer
Day” ends with a call to action, too, suggest-
ing that gratitude involves a sense
of obligation.
That kind of emotional complexity is a
hallmark of the collection. Despite its theme
of thankfulness, “Poems of Gratitude” isn’t
all sweetness and light. One of its recurring
themes is the struggle to see goodness in
spite of, rather than because of, existing cir-
cumstances. In “Those Winter Sundays,”
Robert Hayden recalls a less-than-perfect
childhood in which he would “rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.”
In retrospect, despite the tensions of those
years, the adult poet comes to understand
that his father, though flawed, nevertheless
rose early on Sundays and started a fire to
warm the house, then polished his son’s
best shoes:Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as
well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely
offices?A number of the poems here involve abackward glance, underscoring the degree
to which gratitude often doesn’t come into
focus until the object of our affection is gone.
In other words, as the popular observation
goes, we don’t fully appreciate something
until we lose it.
But what of those souls who savor grace
in its actual moment? In “Wild Gratitude,”
the collection’s opening poem, Edward
Hirsch hints that such visionaries are often
dismissed as daft. He writes of the 18th-
century English poet Christopher Smart,
arguing that Smart’s passion for gratitude
was misread as manic obsession, getting
him locked in an asylum:With his sad religious mania, and
his wild gratitude,
And with his grave prayers for the
other lunatics,
And his great love for his speckled
cat, Jeoffry.
All day today – August 13, 1983 –
I remembered how
Christopher Smart blessed this
same day in August, 1759,
For its calm bravery and ordinary
good conscience.Hirsch concludes that gratitude isn’t just
an exercise in bland serenity, but also indulg-
es abandon, the risk of getting carried away.
True to that reality, many of the selec-
tions in “Poems of Gratitude” embrace ecsta-
sy, as in Anne Sexton’s “Welcome Morning”:There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,BOOKS FOR GLOBAL READERS
So many ways to say ‘thank you’
THIS GLORIOUS COLLECTION OF POEMS CHERISHES
GRATITUDE AS AN ACT OF IMAGINATION.POETRYTODAY, LIKE EVERY OTHER DAY, WE WAKE UP EMPTY
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the
ground.
- Jalal al-Din Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne
THANKS
we are saying thank you faster
and fasterwith nobody listening we are
saying thank youthank you we are saying and
wavingdark though it is
- W.S. Merwin, from ‘Thanks’
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