I just want to wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving! I hope this day, and the rest of your year, is filled with love, laughter, and more blessings than you can count. To help you celebrate, I’ve added one of my favorite Thanksgiving poems to this post. This poem, Thanksgiving, was written by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919). Ella Wilcox was a hugely popular writer because her stories and poems were filled with optimism and hope during difficult times (Civil War, Reconstruction, Gilded Age, Industrial Revolution, the Titanic, and WW1). All of her poems were published in the collections Poems of Passion (W.B. Conkey Company, 1883) and Poems of Peace (Gay & Bird, 1906). But her poem Thanksgiving is still one of her most beloved and famous because she talks about blessings and gratitude in a way that transcends all cultures and faiths. I hope you enjoy it!


This poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox is in the public domain so I reprinted it below.

Thanksgiving

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.



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