Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was an intensely public poet and an intensely private man. His own griefs, and they were considerable, barely make an appearance in all the large body of his verse. The 1848 death of his daughter Fanny, for example, resulted in a poem, “Resignation,” which deals with mourning, that enduring Victorian theme — but in Longfellow’s poem, as a collective experience, not a personal one.

The poet’s immediate, private sorrow goes unmentioned or brushed off, as only what everybody experiences. Though the poem is full of the language of feeling, it defaults, as Longfellow’s poems too often do, to the didactic. How any one person might actually feel, confronted by the reality of death, is of far less import than how everyone should feel. So “Resignation” lectures us, its depersonalized “we.”

Today’s Poem of the Day, “Christmas Bells,” is on every level a better and more interesting poem than “Resignation.” As the bells ring out for Christmas Day, 1863, the terrible year when the American Civil War looked endless, the poem’s speaker (an “I,” not a “we”) contemplates the inviolable beauty of the holy day. What is chiefly beautiful about it, he remarks, is that “the belfries of all Christendom” celebrate it in unison.

The emblem of “peace on earth” is that all people assent to it and experience it, collectively. From the vantage point of Cambridge, Massachusetts, far from the carnage, the poet might have thought it possible to dwell in that happy thought of Christmas everywhere.

But almost immediately, the ongoing war intrudes. However distant the cannons, still they “roar” a song of death and, worse, disunity. In the bells, the speaker hears the cannons he cannot hear. In the bells, he hears America, his own Christendom, falling to pieces. And strikingly, he allows himself to despair: “There is no peace on earth, I said.” The bells’ clanging rings out, as it seems to him, a lie. They tell the world what should be true, not what is.  

With its shifts from tetrameter to dimeter and its refrain, “Of peace on earth, good-will to men,” “Christmas Bells” showcases Longfellow’s dazzling facility with meter. The iambic feet are so precisely placed, line to line, that the one metrical substitution, a dactyl at the start of line thirty-two, disturbs not only the line’s rhythm but the poem’s entire train of thought. 

Confessing his despair, the speaker has just bared his private soul to the cold and brilliant air. Given that this is a Longfellow poem, it’s not that surprising that the bells should promptly respond by telling him how he should feel.

But that metrical shakeup means that the speaker (and by extension, the reader, the collective “we” outside the poem) not only hears the message, but feels it, a vibration that disturbs the pulse like the startling clangor of a bell. When the bells proclaim, “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep,” it’s impossible not to be stirred by their reverberation, impossible to resist what they say. That private shift in feeling becomes, in an instant, everyone’s and our own.

Christmas Bells 
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 
 
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.” 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.