Originally aired on December 23, 1994 - In part 17 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson profiles Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He penned a famous poem on Christmas Day in 1864 despite personal tragedy.
#17 – Christmas Bells
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American institution by the time of the civil war. Many acclaimed him the foremost poet of his age. Certainly his Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish, Evangeline, The Village Blacksmith, and Voices of the Night were classics of American literature by the middle of the 19th century.
The coming of civil war made little initial impression on Longfellow—not because he was unpatriotic in 1861 but because of personal tragedy. Fanny, his beloved wife of 18 years, burned to death in a home accident a week before the first major battle occurred. The poet never fully recovered from the loss. Then, in 1863, more grief came when Longfellow’s 18-year-old son Charles ran away to join the army.
Charles’s service as a lieutenant in the Massachusetts cavalry lasted only a year. In November, 1863, Charles was dangerously wounded in a cavalry action. Longfellow made the painful trip to Washington to take his crippled son home.
The year 1864 was for the laureate a time of anxiety. Longfellow was 57, a concerned father and lonely widower who saw the nation he loved torn asunder by a war that seemed to have no boundaries and no ending. It was with those attitudes that he faced the yuletide season.
On Christmas Day, 1864, Longfellow composed a poem. It has become almost as much a part of the season as Santa Claus. And yet that is far from the case if one listens to every verse, not just those picked for inclusion in a church hymnal.
The poem is entitled Christmas Bells. You perhaps sing the first three stanzas with no thought of anything but the happy, carefree days of noel.
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
What you may not have known until now is that Longfellow then gave way to the despondency of wartime. With a heavy heart he next wrote:
Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men!”
The gentle poet then found assurance and new hope. His last stanza, a call to faith then, has become a shout of joy now.
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!”
Longfellow died in 1882. The gentleness, sweetness, and purity of his works endeared him to the world. He is one of the few American poets to have a bust in England’s Westminster Abbey. While dozens of his poems have an immortal quality, many sentimentalists remember Longfellow most for “the bells on Christmas day” and their tolling the joy “of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
Once again, the Civil War continues to touch our lives in ways large as well as small; and in that vein, my family and I extend to you our sincere wishes for the happiest of holiday seasons.
