You can almost get a handle on Jane Kenyon’s poem, Happiness, until the indented section of the last stanza:
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.
The poem begins by comparing happiness to the sort of prodigal relation who comes back to town and “…finds you asleep midafternoon/as you so often are during the unmerciful/hours of your despair.” Halfway through, Kenyon presents a motley assortment of the kinds of characters who are visited by happiness, whose inclusion in such a list is only occasionally accountable (they include a dog chewing on a sock and also a night shift clerk “stacking cans of carrots”). But these last four lines point to a feature of the presence of happiness that goes beyond randomness. What is it that could bring an elevated state to a boulder, especially one in “perpetual shade”? What is more hopeless than rain dropping into the sea, or more pitiable than something tiring of fulfilling its sole reason for existing? I think its possible that the happiness Kenyon is referring to here is at least nearly synonymous with grace – some inexplicable thing that alights where it will, without force but capable of suffusing even the least of the blasted world with something like life.
“There’s just no accounting for happiness,” is the poem’s first line. Read the rest of it here.
WHAT IS HAPPINESS? 
Jane Kenyon’s name rang a bell…turns out I just read another good writer’s commentary on her work…He (Padraig O Tuama) said “I remember the moment when I read Jane Kenyon’s poem [The Suitor]. Good writing, the adage tells us, is when we read something we’ve always known but never been able to put into words. In Kenyon’s poem I understood the quiet approach of happiness. I understood that if happiness were to approach, it’d be wise to approach from the side, because I was likely to distrust anything too exuberant. It’s perhaps an indication of my own temperament, as well as a story of Irish people. And -as I was discovering – a story of some American people too.” Made perfect sense to me. Grateful for the sharing!
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