Before Whittier lets his pumpkin anywhere near a dinner plate, he sends it on a world tour. The poem opens in "the lands of the sun," where gourds and melons climb over rocks, trees and cottages. It then borrows the shade-giving plant that grew over "Nineveh's prophet," a nod to the biblical Jonah waiting for a disaster that never came. From there it moves to a Spanish girl on the banks of the Xenil and a laughing Cuban under orange trees, before settling on the Yankee looking over his own field. The route is the argument. The exotic world has its beauties, but the New Englander looks at his crook-necked squashes "with dearer delight." What he loves best is what belongs to him.
That affection is carried by the poem's rhythm. The lines are mostly anapestic tetrameter, four beats with two light syllables before each stress, and they tumble forward in rhymed couplets: "Oh, GREENly and FAIR in the LANDS of the SUN." The effect is closer to a toast or a nursery rhyme than to solemn verse. Feminine rhymes like "maiden / laden" and "recalling / falling" add to the bounce. The meter suits a subject that is meant to be enjoyed, and it makes the mock-grandeur easy to take as play.
Colour and light hold the poem together. It begins in green, with "broad leaves all greenness and blossoms all gold." Gold then keeps coming back: "broad spheres of gold," "yellow fruit shines," and a September sun that "melts down on his vines," a verb that already feels like cooking. By the last line the colour has spread to the sky, and the speaker hopes the baker's life will end under a sunset "golden-tinted and fair as thy own Pumpkin pie." The pie has become the standard by which sunsets are judged.
The third stanza is where the poem's comedy and its feeling meet. Thanksgiving gathers family "from East and from West, / From North and from South," and the language swells: "old broken links of affection restored," a "care-wearied man" seeking his mother, a matron who smiles "where the girl smiled before." This is the voice of a hymn. Then comes the question, "What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie?" The drop from lofty to homely is deliberate, but it isn't only a joke. Taste really can restore the past, and the poem lets the pie stand for the whole reunion.
Childhood memory then takes over, and the pumpkin turns into a shape-shifter. It becomes a carved lantern with "wild, ugly faces" and a candle glaring out of the dark, then a seat at the corn-heap ("our chair a broad pumpkin, — our lantern the moon"), then a fairy's coach drawn by "two rats for her team." The details are small and physical, and they make the nostalgia feel earned.
The closing stanza turns to a "thee," an unnamed woman who has given the speaker a pie. The compliments are lavish, with hands that never "wrought at a pastry more fine" and eyes that never watched a baking more closely. Then comes the poem's best joke, a prayer his "mouth is too full to express." Gratitude is spoken with a full mouth, and the blessing that follows, that her "shadow may never be less" and her fame "like a pumpkin-vine grow," is both ridiculous and warm.
The poem's significance lies in this balance. It gives a kitchen vegetable the scale of a biblical plant, a travel romance and a family festival, and it never quite mocks the feeling behind the exaggeration. Its loyalties are plainly to the local and the domestic: the Yankee field over the Spanish river, the home table over the foreign orchard. It suggests that gratitude, memory and belonging can be served on a plate, and it makes a good case that this is worth a poem.