Poems About Joy
Curated by the Writory editorial team. Updated September 2026.
Quick answer: Read 13 of the greatest poems about joy and gladness, from Blake and Dickinson to Whitman and Dunbar. Full texts with short notes on what makes each one sing.
Joy is harder to write than sorrow. Grief slows a poet down and gives them time to be exact, while happiness tends to blur into cheer. The poems here refuse to blur. They pin joy to a real thing: a child laughing, a field of autumn colour, a single good morning.
Blake pipes his songs down the valleys wild. Dickinson decides the pain was worth the prize. Whitman opens his arms to the whole living world at once.
Read a few aloud when the day has gone grey. They were built to lift it.
Infant Joy
William Blake · Romantic
"I have no name;
I am but two days old."
What shall I call thee?
"I happy am,
Joy is my name."
Sweet joy befall thee!
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy, but two days old.
Sweet Joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while;
Sweet joy befall thee!
Two voices over a cradle naming the newborn's only feeling. Joy so new it can barely speak.
Laughing Song
William Blake · Romantic
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;
when the meadows laugh with lively green,
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene,
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing "Ha, ha he!"
When the painted birds laugh in the shade,
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread:
Come live, and be merry, and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of "Ha, ha, he!"
The green woods laugh, the air laughs, and Blake dares you not to join in.
A Lyric to Mirth
Robert Herrick · Cavalier
While the milder fates consent,
Let's enjoy our merriment :
Drink, and dance, and pipe, and play ;
Kiss our dollies night and day :
Crowned with clusters of the vine,
Let us sit, and quaff our wine.
Call on Bacchus, chant his praise ;
Shake the thyrse, and bite the bays :
Rouse Anacreon from the dead,
And return him drunk to bed :
Sing o'er Horace, for ere long
Death will come and mar the song :
Then shall Wilson and Gotiere
Never sing or play more here.
The Gladness of Nature
William Cullen Bryant · American
Is this a time to be cloudy and sad,
When our mother Nature laughs around;
When even the deep blue heavens look glad,
And gladness breathes from the blossoming ground?
There are notes of joy from the hang-bird and wren,
And the gossip of swallows through all the sky;
The ground-squirrel gaily chirps by his den,
And the wilding bee hums merrily by.
The clouds are at play in the azure space,
And their shadows at play on the bright green vale,
And here they stretch to the frolic chase,
And there they roll on the easy gale.
There's a dance of leaves in that aspen bower,
There's a titter of winds in that beechen tree,
There's a smile on the fruit, and a smile on the flower,
And a laugh from the brook that runs to the sea.
And look at the broad-faced sun, how he smiles
On the dewy earth that smiles in his ray,
On the leaping waters and gay young isles;
Ay, look, and he'll smile thy gloom away.
Bryant goes out looking for melancholy and finds the whole field in a good mood instead.
Joy to have merited the Pain --
Emily Dickinson · American
Joy to have merited the Pain --
To merit the Release --
Joy to have perished every step --
To Compass Paradise --
Pardon -- to look upon thy face --
With these old fashioned Eyes --
Better than new -- could be -- for that --
Though bought in Paradise --
Because they looked on thee before --
And thou hast looked on them --
Prove Me -- My Hazel Witnesses
The features are the same --
So fleet thou wert, when present --
So infinite -- when gone --
An Orient's Apparition --
Remanded of the Morn --
The Height I recollect --
'Twas even with the Hills --
The Depth upon my Soul was notched --
As Floods -- on Whites of Wheels --
To Haunt -- till Time have dropped
His last Decade away,
And Haunting actualize -- to last
At least -- Eternity --
Dickinson counts the cost and decides the joy was worth every ounce of the ache that bought it.
A Child's Laughter
Algernon Charles Swinburne · Victorian
ALL the bells of heaven may ring,
All the birds of heaven may sing,
All the wells on earth may spring,
All the winds on earth may bring
All sweet sounds together---
Sweeter far than all things heard,
Hand of harper, tone of bird,
Sound of woods at sundawn stirred,
Welling water's winsome word,
Wind in warm wan weather,
One thing yet there is, that none
Hearing ere its chime be done
Knows not well the sweetest one
Heard of man beneath the sun,
Hoped in heaven hereafter;
Soft and strong and loud and light,
Very sound of very light
Heard from morning's rosiest height,
When the soul of all delight
Fills a child's clear laughter.
Golden bells of welcome rolled
Never forth such notes, nor told
Hours so blithe in tones so bold,
As the radiant mouth of gold
Here that rings forth heaven.
If the golden-crested wren
Were a nightingale---why, then,
Something seen and heard of men
Might be half as sweet as when
Laughs a child of seven.
A hundred sweet things listed and beaten, one by one, by the sound of a child laughing.
Merry Autumn
Paul Laurence Dunbar · American
It's all a farce,--these tales they tell
About the breezes sighing,
And moans astir o'er field and dell,
Because the year is dying.
Such principles are most absurd,--
I care not who first taught 'em;
There's nothing known to beast or bird
To make a solemn autumn.
In solemn times, when grief holds sway
With countenance distressing,
You'll note the more of black and gray
Will then be used in dressing.
Now purple tints are all around;
The sky is blue and mellow;
And e'en the grasses turn the ground
From modest green to yellow.
The seed burs all with laughter crack
On featherweed and jimson;
And leaves that should be dressed in black
Are all decked out in crimson.
A butterfly goes winging by;
A singing bird comes after;
And Nature, all from earth to sky,
Is bubbling o'er with laughter.
The ripples wimple on the rills,
Like sparkling little lasses;
The sunlight runs along the hills,
And laughs among the grasses.
The earth is just so full of fun
It really can't contain it;
And streams of mirth so freely run
The heavens seem to rain it.
Don't talk to me of solemn days
In autumn's time of splendor,
Because the sun shows fewer rays,
And these grow slant and slender.
Why, it's the climax of the year,--
The highest time of living!--
Till naturally its bursting cheer
Just melts into thanksgiving.
Dunbar refuses the idea that autumn must be sad and throws the season a party instead.
Songs From Pippa Passes
Robert Browning · Victorian
Day!
Faster and more fast,
O'er night's brim, day boils at last:
Boils, pure gold, o'er the cloud-cup's brim.
Where spurting and suppressed it lay,
For not a froth-flake touched the rim
Of yonder gap in the solid gray
Of the eastern cloud, an hour away;
But forth one wavelet, then another, curled,
Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed,
Rose, reddened, and its seething breast
Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world.
All service ranks the same with God:
If now, as formerly He trod
Paradise, His presence fills
Our earth, each only as God wills
Can work--God's puppets, best and worst,
Are we: there is no last nor first.
The year's at the spring
And day's at the morn:
Morning's at seven;
The hillside's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in His heaven--
All's right with the world!
Give her but a least excuse to love me!
When--where--
How--can this arm establish her above me,
If fortune fixed her as my lady there,
There already, to eternally reprove me?
("Hist!"--said Kate the queen;
But "Oh," cried the maiden, binding her tresses,
"'Tis only a page that carols unseen,
Crumbling your hounds their messes!")
Is she wronged?--To the rescue of her honour,
My heart!
Is she poor?--What costs it to be styled a donor?
Merely an earth to cleave, a sea to part.
But that fortune should have thrust all this upon her!
("Nay, list!"--bade Kate the queen;
And still cried the maiden, binding her tresses,
"'Tis only a page that carols unseen,
Fitting your hawks their jesses!")
Contains the famous morning verse: the lark, the snail, and God in his heaven, all right with the world.
Bards of Passion and of Mirth, written on the Blank Page before Beaumont and Fletcher's Tragi-Comedy 'The Fair Maid of the Inn'
John Keats · Romantic
BARDS of Passion and of Mirth,
Ye have left your souls on earth!
Have ye souls in heaven too,
Doubled-lived in regions new?
Yes, and those of heaven commune
With the spheres of sun and moon;
With the noise of fountains wondrous,
And the parle of voices thund'rous;
With the whisper of heaven's trees
And one another, in soft ease
Seated on Elysian lawns
Browsed by none but Dian's fawns;
Underneath large blue-bells tented,
Where the daisies are rose-scented,
And the rose herself has got
Perfume which on earth is not;
Where the nightingale doth sing
Not a senseless, tranced thing,
But divine melodious truth;
Philosophic numbers smooth;
Tales and golden histories
Of heaven and its mysteries.
Thus ye live on high, and then
On the earth ye live again;
And the souls ye left behind you
Teach us, here, the way to find you,
Where your other souls are joying,
Never slumber'd, never cloying.
Here, your earth-born souls still speak
To mortals, of their little week;
Of their sorrows and delights;
Of their passions and their spites;
Of their glory and their shame;
What doth strengthen and what maim.
Thus ye teach us, every day,
Wisdom, though fled far away.
Bards of Passion and of Mirth,
Ye have left your souls on earth!
Ye have souls in heaven too,
Double-lived in regions new!
Happy Thought
Robert Louis Stevenson
The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.
Two lines a child could learn by heart, and true enough that adults keep quoting them.
How still, how happy!
Emily Bronte · Victorian
How still, how happy! Those are words
That once would scarce agree together;
I loved the plashing of the surge -
The changing heaven the breezy weather,
More than smooth seas and cloudless skies
And solemn, soothing, softened airs
That in the forest woke no sighs
And from the green spray shook no tears.
How still, how happy! now I feel
Where silence dwells is sweeter far
Than laughing mirth's most joyous swell
However pure its raptures are.
Come, sit down on this sunny stone:
'Tis wintry light o'er flowerless moors -
But sit - for we are all alone
And clear expand heaven's breathless shores.
I could think in the withered grass
Spring's budding wreaths we might discern;
The violet's eye might shyly flash
And young leaves shoot among the fern.
It is but thought - full many a night
The snow shall clothe those hills afar
And storms shall add a drearier blight
And winds shall wage a wilder war,
Before the lark may herald in
Fresh foliage twined with blossoms fair
And summer days again begin
Their glory - haloed crown to wear.
Yet my heart loves December's smile
As much as July's golden beam;
Then let us sit and watch the while
The blue ice curdling on the stream -
Bronte finds happiness precisely where the world is quietest, far from noise and company.
Oh! Think Not My Spirits Are Always As Light
Thomas Moore · Romantic
Oh! think not my spirits are always as light,
And as free from a pang as they seem to you now,
Nor expect that the heart-beaming smile of to-night
Will return with to-morrow to brighten my brow.
No: -- life is a waste of wearisome hours,
Which seldom the rose of enjoyment adorns;
And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers,
Is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.
But send round the bowl, and be happy awhile --
May we never meet worse, in our pilgrimage here,
Than the tear that enjoyment may gild with a smile,
And the smile that compassion can turn to a tear.
The thread of our life would be dark, Heaven knows
If it were not with friendship and love intertwined;
And I care not how soon I may sink to repose,
When these blessing shall cease to be dear to my mind.
But they who have loved the fondest, the purest,
Too often have wept o'er the dream they believed;
And the heart that has slumber'd in friendship securest
Is happy indeed if 'twas never deceived.
But send round the bowl; while a relic of truth
Is in man or in woman, this prayer shall be mine, --
That the sunshine of love may illumine our youth,
And the moonlight of friendship console our decline.
The words the happy say
Emily Dickinson · American
The words the happy say
Are paltry melody
But those the silent feel
Are beautiful --
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a good short poem about joy?
William Blake's 'Infant Joy' and Robert Louis Stevenson's two-line 'Happy Thought' both hold a whole mood in a few words. Emily Dickinson's 'The words the happy say' is another that fits in a breath.
Which poets wrote best about happiness?
William Blake, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Paul Laurence Dunbar all found ways to catch delight without letting it turn to mush. This page sets their poems side by side.
What makes a joyful poem work?
Specifics. The joy that lasts on the page is fixed to one real thing, a laugh, a field, a morning, rather than announced in the abstract.
How to write a poem about joy
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