164. I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day

The Story Behind the Hymn

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of the most widely read American poets of the nineteenth century, wrote the poem underlying this hymn on Christmas Day 1863, during one of the darkest personal and national periods of his life. His wife had died two years earlier in a house fire, and his eldest son, Charles, had run away to enlist in the Union Army against his father's wishes and had been severely wounded only weeks earlier at the Battle of New Hope Church during the ongoing American Civil War, leaving Longfellow uncertain whether his son would ever fully recover.

The poem's original text, considerably longer than the hymn version commonly sung today, included two additional verses directly referencing the Civil War itself — describing cannon thundering 'in the South' with a violence that seemed to 'drown the songs of peace on earth, good will to men' — verses generally omitted from hymnal versions of the carol but essential to understanding the poem's original, considerably darker context as a piece written not in comfortable Christmas celebration but in genuine grief and doubt.

The poem's central movement, from despair over the apparent triumph of 'hate' and violence in the third verse to renewed hope in its final verse — 'God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; the wrong shall fail, the right prevail' — reflects Longfellow working through his own genuine uncertainty about whether Christmas's ancient promise of peace could possibly hold true against the specific, immediate backdrop of a nation at war and a son gravely wounded in that same war.

John Baptiste Calkin, an English organist and composer, set Longfellow's poem to music in 1872, nearly a decade after its original composition and considerably after the Civil War itself had ended, giving the completed hymn a fuller emotional resolution than perhaps the war-weary, uncertain poem Longfellow had originally written alone on that particular Christmas Day in 1863.