I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day

Today's voyage down the Internet rabbit hole is inspired in part by a fellow Facebooker's love of Christmas music.

I, too, am a fan. I listen to it year-round, unashamedly.

I offer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day." It was a song written out of grief and despair. Longfellow lost his wife of 18 years when she died after her dress caught fire. On Christmas Day in 1863 he sat with his son who was nursing a bullet wound suffered at the Battle of Mine Run in the American Civil War, he heard nearby church bells pealing.

He picked up his pen, and in those uncertain, dark times, wrote:

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!

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!"

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."

The now mostly-forgotten stanzas relating directly to the Civil War add an emotional punch to the poem and song already not lacking in emotional punches.

Adding to Longfellow's despair might have been the result of the battle of Mine Run: Inconsequential to the overall war effort, but a battle in which Union General Edward Johnson lost 550 men, or 10 percent of his fighting strength.