Today’s Poem of the Day, “Music on Christmas Morning,” appeared originally in 1846, in a volume of poetry by three authors, purportedly brothers: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The book was a stunning non-success, selling only two copies in the year of its publication. Like so many poets of the mid-nineteenth century — see, for example, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, whose “Sonnet XVI” was Poem of the Day on December 14 — the Brothers Bell might have languished unknown in their lifetimes and beyond. Only one stroke of fortune saved them from literary obscurity.

That stroke of fortune? It was simply that the Brothers Bell did not exist, except as pen names for Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë. Remarkably undeterred by their failure in the poetry market, all three sisters responded by beginning the novels which established them, eventually, under their own names, in the English literary canon. Anne, the youngest sister, saw her first novel, “Agnes Grey,” detailing her harrowing experiences as a governess, appear in the aftermath of her sister Charlotte’s success with “Jane Eyre,” to be criticized as a pallid imitation. She lived to write one more novel, “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” before succumbing, at age twenty-nine, to the tuberculosis which had already ravaged her family. For the rest of their short lives, the sisters continued to write and publish poems as well as novels. Emily’s “To a Wreath of Snow,” for example, appeared as Poem of the Day on Monday.

As Acton Bell the poet, Anne Brontë wrote pleasingly enough, if not with the righteous fury that animates her novels. The Brothers Bell, after all, belonged to an era when anyone who was literate at all could produce a competent poem in rhyme and meter. Most of the poems in the 1846 collection feel like poems that anyone could have written under a pseudonym, simply for something to do — a person perhaps more sincere and less funny than Jane Austen, whose “Oh! Mr. Best, You’re Very Bad,” appeared as Poem of the Day in October.