Walking through an orchard in autumn, the speaker of "Song of Thanksgiving" is overcome by a sense of wealth, and the poem is really a single swelling moment of gratitude. Nothing happens in a narrative sense. A person walks, breathes, catches falling leaves, and feels richer than any ledger could record. Its central idea is that thanksgiving is not only a response to what we are given but an intoxication, a delight so large that, as the last line admits, "no tongue could command" the words to express it.
The poem's most striking move is its pairing of nature with money. The falling leaves are "golden," and they drop "like old coins stamped with an ancient design." The simile does two things at once. It makes the leaves precious, but it also gives them age and pedigree: these are not new coins but old ones, carrying a design that seems to come from far back. The image suggests that the cycle of seasons is itself ancient treasure, handed down and renewed every year. The idea returns in the second stanza, when the speaker catches at the leaves "with a miser's quick hand." A miser is usually a figure of greed, yet here the comparison is oddly gentle. The speaker hoards only leaves, which cost nothing and will crumble, so the greed becomes a playful one, a child's delight dressed up in an adult's vocabulary. The financial language ("spoils," "wealth," "coins," "miser") builds a quiet argument that the truest riches are the ones the season gives away freely.
The senses carry much of the poem's feeling. The "breath of the fruit-trees" is "stronger than wine," and in the second stanza the speaker "drank from the wind as one quaffs from a flagon." Both images turn air into drink, and both suggest intoxication. This is a clever choice, because thanksgiving is often imagined as solemn and restrained, and here it is closer to being slightly drunk on abundance. The wind is the poem's engine, too: "each toss of the wind" shakes down the leaves, and the same wind is what the speaker drinks. Everything flows from one source, and the speaker simply stands in its path, receptive.
Structurally, the poem is compact and tightly knit. Each stanza has five lines, and the rhyme scheme is unusual: the first stanza rhymes calling / falling, wine / design / mine, so that its pattern is ABABB. The second follows the same plan with wagon / flagon and hand / land / command. That doubled rhyme at the close of each stanza gives the poem a feeling of settling, of a satisfied exhale after the buildup of the earlier lines. Notice also that the final rhyme words, "mine" and "command," are about possession and control, even as the poem insists these things are finally beyond reach. The speaker feels the spoils are "mine," yet by the end the feeling has outgrown any power of speech.
The rhythm supports this mood. The lines are long and roll forward in a lilting, galloping beat, with many unstressed syllables tumbling between the stresses, a movement that feels like walking at an easy pace or like leaves drifting down. Words like "calling" and "falling," with their soft, open endings, extend the sense of motion. The personification in "when Autumn was calling" gives the season a voice and makes the walk feel like an answer to an invitation.
What makes the poem worth reading is its modesty and its warmth. It does not lecture about gratitude or list things to be thankful for. Instead it lets us feel a moment of plenty from the inside, through coins, wine and a harvester's wagon "heaped high." The poem's title promises a song, and the poem delivers one: simple, musical, and generous. It reminds us that gratitude can be a physical sensation, as immediate as wind on the face, and that being thankful may begin with nothing more than noticing how much is falling around us.