Gratitude usually seems like the easy emotion, but in "The Thanksgiving" George Herbert turns it into a problem with no solution. The speaker looks at Christ's suffering and asks what he could possibly give back. The poem records his attempts, and its joke, which is both comic and painful, is that he keeps postponing the one thing that matters until he has run out of room to do it.
He begins by rejecting the obvious responses. Should he weep? "Thou has wept such store / That all thy body was one door", an image of wounds so many that the body is only an opening. Should he suffer too? "'Tis but to tell the tale is told", since the story already exists. Even the cry from the cross, "My God, my God, why dost thou part from me?", marks a grief "as cannot be" matched. The verb "preventest" helps here. In its older sense it means "comes before," so Christ's grief has arrived ahead of the speaker's and left him nothing to add. The most unsettling attempt follows: "Shall thy strokes be my stroking? thorns, my flower? / Thy rod, my posy? cross, my bower?" Each instrument of torture becomes a garden pleasure, and the jingling sound, with "strokes" and "stroking" and the skipping rhythm, is deliberately too cheerful. The speaker drops the idea almost as soon as he voices it.
Then the poem turns on a startling line: "Surely I will revenge me on thy love." Thanks becomes a contest in which the speaker will try to out-give God, "And try who shall victorious prove." What follows is a run of confident "I will" pledges. He will send wealth back "by the poor," and credit any honour to God. His family will be God's, and he will tear out a friend's love if the friend blasphemes. The tone is brisk and businesslike, almost swaggering, like someone drawing up a contract. Small cracks show, though. "Three years hence, if I survive" is already a deferral, and the couplet about building "a spittle" (an old word for a hospital) ends on a wry self-correction: "But mend mine own without delays." The speaker's own conduct, it turns out, needs repair more than any road.
The form carries this nervous energy. The poem has no stanza breaks, only twenty-four rhyming couplets, so it rushes forward like someone talking himself into a plan. Many couplets pair a longer line with a shorter one, and the short line often snaps shut with a neat rhyme: "Who in all grief preventest me?" Sometimes the syntax spills over the line, as in "how then shall I imitate thee, and / Copy thy fair, though bloody hand?" The pace gives the speaker's plans an air of improvisation, as if he is inventing them as he goes.
Meanwhile the real subject keeps being pushed aside. "As for thy passion - But of that anon, / When with the other I have done." The dash and the casual "anon" make the greatest event in the poem sound like an item on a to-do list. Other pledges are lovelier but still evasive. The speaker's strings will each have "his attribute to sing," so that all may "prove one God, one harmony." He will read scripture until he finds God's "art of love," then "turn back on thee" what he has learned, and the exclamation "O my dear Saviour, Victory!" briefly lets the poem's confidence soar. He also offers God his "wit" in a cheeky, clipped line: "If thou hast giv'n it me, 'tis here."
Then the plans stop. "Then for thy passion - I will do for that - / Alas, my God, I know not what." The dashes show him hesitating, and "what" meets "that" in a rhyme that, to a modern ear, is only approximate. The two lines are the shortest, plainest speech in the poem, and they are its most honest.
That ending is why the poem matters. A reader expects a list of good works to crown the speaker's devotion. Instead Herbert lets the list fail. Almsgiving, hospitals, music and Bible-reading, the sort of duties a priest would know well (Herbert was a priest in the Church of England), all fall short of the Passion. In admitting that, the speaker may offer the only sincere thanks available to him. The poem teaches that real gratitude begins when we stop pretending we can pay the debt.