Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s “Thanksgiving” from her collection, Custer and Other Poems, is a beautiful ode to gratitude and noticing.
Can we express more gratitude in our life by noticing life’s details? Can we offer praise to those who do kind things for us and for others? Do we let our constant worries prevent us from seeing the joys in our lives?
Notice the daisies as you walk on “starry fields of white.” Don’t wait to find “supreme delight” but try to find your “daily store / Of pleasures sweet and tender.” Don’t “pass by and forget” the unobtrusive joys in your life
“We ought to make the moments notes
Of happy, glad Thanksgiving;
The hours and days a silent phrase
Of music we are living.”
It’s not about finding gratitude in everything but about finding the things to appreciate in every moment.
“Thanksgiving” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
We walk on starry fields of white
And do not see the daisies;
For blessings common in our sight
We rarely offer praises.
We sigh for some supreme delight
To crown our lives with splendor,
And quite ignore our daily store
Of pleasures sweet and tender.Our cares are bold and push their way
Upon our thought and feeling.
They hand about us all the day,
Our time from pleasure stealing.
So unobtrusive many a joy
We pass by and forget it,
But worry strives to own our lives,
And conquers if we let it.There’s not a day in all the year
But holds some hidden pleasure,
And looking back, joys oft appear
To brim the past’s wide measure.
But blessings are like friends, I hold,
Who love and labor near us.
We ought to raise our notes of praise
While living hearts can hear us.Full many a blessing wears the guise
Of worry or of trouble;
Far-seeing is the soul, and wise,
Who knows the mask is double.
But he who has the faith and strength
To thank his God for sorrow
Has found a joy without alloy
To gladden every morrow.We ought to make the moments notes
Of happy, glad Thanksgiving;
The hours and days a silent phrase
Of music we are living.
And so the theme should swell and grow
As weeks and months pass o’er us,
And rise sublime at this good time,
A grand Thanksgiving chorus.
