Back to: The Twelve Days of Christmas Carols
The author Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was born and grew up in Portland Maine. This setting provided a larger view of the world than the interior towns. He was very precocious and at the age of nineteen, he assumed the position of professor of modern language at Bowdoin College. In this role, he not only taught during school terms but also traveled and studied in Europe. He was a well-respected scholar. He eventually was lured to teach at Harvard with a home overlooking the Charles River. Despite his growing reputation, he endured tragedy. Within a year of life in Boston, his wife grew ill and died.
To deal with his grief, a mournful Longfellow poured himself into his teaching. After seven years he remarried and had five children. His poetry during this period was well known – “Evangeline,” “The Song of Hiawatha,” and “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” By 1860 he had found wealth and worldwide fame as a great writer. He was among the first of American writers to use native themes and in Hiawatha the first to celebrate Indian themes. Despite being given honorary degrees at Oxford and Cambridge, and an invitation to Windsor by Queen Victoria, 1861 was a year filled with great sadness.
There are two stories what happened to Longfellow’s wife. While lighting a match, Longfellow’s second wife’s clothes caught fire and she burned to death. Another is that Longfellow’s wife trimmed some off their seven-year-old daughter’s curls on July 10, 1861, she decided to preserve them in wax. She failed to notice that some of the wax had fallen on her dress, which caught fire.
To make matters worse his faith was again challenged by the American Civil War. It became a family issue Against his father’s wishes, Longfellow’s son, Charles joined the war. He wrote, “I have tried hard to resist the temptation of going without your leave but I cannot any longer”, he wrote. “I feel it to be my first duty to do what I can for my country and I would willingly lay down my life for it if it would be of any good.”
Charles was soon appointed as a lieutenant but, in November, he was severely wounded in the Battle of Mine Run, he eventually recovered, but his time as a soldier was finished.
It was the ringing of Christmas bells that probably inspired Longfellow on December 25, 1863. That day Longfellow hung his whole message on the tolling of the church bells. Yet while most Christmas verse is light and uplifting, the message darker and solemn reflected his mood that Christmas.
Almost ten years later, in 1872, an Englishman named John Baptiste Calkin decided to add music to Longfellow’s Christmas poem. The organist and music teacher wrote a soaring melody that contained the power to not only convey the bleak imagery of Longfellow’s sadness in the poem’s tormented first few verses, but the poet’s deep and abiding faith in the ode’s exhilarating conclusion. Except for the deletion of the two verses that dwelled on the poet’s view of the Civil War, the song remains the same today as it was when first published.
The combination of the tragedy and insanity in the world, with its hope that somehow the joy, comfort, and peace that Christ was born to offer would be realized has made the song popular particular during future war years