`Thinking and Thanking Became One'

Let’s agree to call it happiness, a much-abused word. Contentment is closer – balance, equipoise, not having to wrestle after inner ease. Whatever the word, the state seems unattainable without gratitude. If I could vaccinate my kids with one virtue it would be a robust sense of thankfulness, a medicine that quiets our self-centered demands on the world. In a remembrance of his friend W.H. Auden, Oliver Sacks says “a genius for appreciation, for affection and gratitude, lay at the very centre of Wystan’s whole being.” That’s one of the reasons I reread Auden. Much current poetry assumes an immense sense of aggrieved entitlement – for understanding, appreciation, sympathy, love -- a baby’s litany. Auden’s instinct was to offer thanks for the gifts he, like all of us, had done nothing to deserve.

Auden’s final book of poems, published posthumously in 1974, is Thank You, Fog. It contains a poem titled “Thanksgiving,” and the volume’s best-known line is from “Lullaby”: “Let your last thinks all be thanks.” In his Auden and Christianity, Arthur Kirsch says this sentence “could be an epigraph for the later years of Auden’s life.” Conventional wisdom slights Auden’s later poems and accepts 1939, the year he immigrated to the United States, as the beginning of a long poetic slide. For a long time I foolishly accepted this notion. No portion of a poet’s life which includes “In Praise of Limestone” and “Horae Canonicae” can signify a decline. Consider these lines from “Precious Five” (1950), addressed to the poet’s senses:

“I can (which you cannot)
Find reasons fast enough
To face the sky and roar
In anger and despair
At what is going on,
Demanding that it name
Whoever is to blame:
The sky would only wait
Till my breath was gone
And then reiterate
As if I wasn’t there
That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?”

Sacks says of his friend: “Wystan’s mind and heart came closer and closer in the course of his life, until thinking and thanking became one and the same.”