On a cold March day, a poet sat down to write. Snow swirled and the Massachusetts streets outside his Cambridge home were becoming impassable. Snowfall this late in the season was unusual, though not unheard of.
The clean-shaven man, a year past 30, had become a widower only three years previous. With no children, and having only recently relocated from Europe to accept a faculty position at Harvard College, he was alone.
March 28, 1838. Tremendous snow-storm, the young Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his journal. Shut up all day. Through the gusts of the mighty north wind and the snow, the church bells seemed to cry for help. Winter has come back for his umbrella. Begone, old man, and wag not thy hoary beard at me!
Twenty-five years would pass before Longfellow would hear those same bells again, coming from a Cambridge church down the road, and pen his timeless poem, “Christmas Bells” (later “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”). In those 21⁄2 decades, he would remarry, accrue growing fame for his writing and father six children.
Prosperity didn’t last — as it rarely does. The snow returned, as it did each year, and with it came sorrow and civil war, death and disease. His second wife, too, would die, as would a child; another son would sneak off to war and return home nearly paralyzed.
At the close of a hectic 1863, Longfellow’s world was shattered, and his words speak to our current chaos — a time riddled with the ravages of a plague and its attendant social, political and economic consequences.
“And in despair I bowed my head,” Longfellow wrote. “There is no peace on earth,”
… For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
Longfellow’s anguished cry in 1863 was not an outburst after a dark day or a dark week. He instead was living in a dark world — a country divided by civil war, a city ravished by economic and social hardship, a household fractured by injury and death.
Three years earlier, The Atlantic Monthly — a publication founded by Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and other abolitionists — officially endorsed Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election. In so doing, they called the election “a turning-point in our history,” denoting the debate over slavery “a crisis on our domestic policy more momentous than any that has arisen since we became a nation.”
“The Lord’s mercy often rides to the door of our heart upon the black horse of affliction.” — Charles Spurgeon
Longfellow and his colleagues rebuked the state of American politics in words that ring true nearly a century-and-a-half later: “The very government itself seems an organized scramble, and Congress a boys’ debating-club, with the disadvantage of being reported.”
Though the editorial predicted that Lincoln’s election would do much to “appease the excitement of the country” and quell Southern threats of secession, the opposite proved true. As war appeared increasingly inevitable, Longfellow’s famed poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” was printed in the January 1861 edition of The Atlantic, issuing a wakeup call to the slumbering Union:
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoofbeats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
The Civil War broke out months later, in early April 1861. Longfellow, nearly a thousand miles northeast of Fort Sumter, felt the repercussions still. “Weary days with wars and rumors of wars, and marching of troops, and flags waving, and people talking,” he wrote in his journal, 11 days after the first shots were fired. “No reading but reading of newspapers” — an oddity for him, whose journals usually chronicled daily perusings of Dante or Cervantes or Shakespeare.
Guns and cannons weren’t the only causes of death. As soldiers ran rampant, so did disease. Epidemics piled on top of each other — dysentery, typhoid fever, smallpox. By the end of the war, more soldiers died from disease than from battle. Some two-thirds of the war’s 600,000 total fatalities came from sickness.
Amidst the somberities of disease and war, Longfellow’s journals maintained a positive — albeit cautious — tone. In early July, though, his entries suddenly stopped. The next entry, written upon returning from a retreat at his summer home in northern Massachusetts, is short.
September 10. Return from Nahant to this desolate, desolate house.
Months after eulogizing Paul Revere, Longfellow would enter his own hour of darkness and peril and need. A widower for the second time, his beloved Fanny was gone.
Fanny’s burial was on the 18-year anniversary of her marriage with Longfellow. She died after a fire in their home, and Longfellow was so badly burned from trying to save her that he could not attend the burial.
There, his body bandaged, his grief unsurmountable, bedridden in a Cambridge mansion once inhabited by George Washington, Longfellow wallowed. Accounts from his children from that time are scarce; his own journal is blank. Six months later, his journal read, “I can make no record of these days. Better leave them wrapped in silence. Perhaps someday God will give me peace.” A biographer later noted that “he bore his grief with courage and silence.”
“‘A merry Christmas,’ say the children; but that is no more, for me.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dec. 25, 1862
To one friend, who had offered consoling hope in Longfellow’s ability to “bear his cross,” the wearied Longfellow replied, “Bear the cross, yes; but what if one is stretched upon it?”
As they always do, the months passed — tediously, no doubt — and the Christmas season arrived. The bells at the local chapel rang. Longfellow either felt little peace, or chose not to chronicle it — his journal for Dec. 25, 1861, only reads, “How inexpressibly sad are all the holidays.”
A year later, the bells again rang. His journal was no more cheerful this time.
“‘A merry Christmas,’ say the children; but that is no more, for me,” he wrote.
Snow melted and spring came, yet Longfellow’s world soon took another blow. His oldest son, Charles, snuck away from home to fight in the Civil War, without his father’s knowledge or consent. The only reference to Charles’ departure in his father’s journal is a brief entry on March 14: “This has been a sad week to me.”
Charles didn’t last long. By mid-summer, he was home after a bout with typhoid fever. He returned to battle, but was released weeks before Christmas after being shot through the shoulder. The medics first thought he would be paralyzed — he later recovered, but spent weeks bedridden at home.
There, with war and disease spreading, with little relief in sight, a bearded Longfellow — now growing his trademark facial hair to mask the burn marks accrued the day his wife died — penned what would later become one of the most cherished Christmas songs: an ode to grief, to pain, to hope, to solace.
Longfellow’s journals and correspondence don’t describe what happened next. But somehow, some way, a switch flipped, and Longfellow saw beyond the present pain and turmoil. The sound of bells — likely the same church bells he heard the previous Christmas, and the year before, and the year before that — now brought a different message. They reminded of a truth more deep and more eternal than any chaotic war or deadly disease — that God lives, that Right will prevail, that peace still exists on earth.
In some ways, Longfellow’s ability to find hope in Christmas bells is paradoxical. The crux of his poem is sorrow and suffering, yet the result is joy. From a literary standpoint, his final verse — alluding to faith and peace — doesn’t flow; from a practical view, it doesn’t fit.
It’s been said, though, that grief is linear — that pain and suffering come in waves, not in some sort of gradual arrival and dismissal. “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being,” Lebanese poet Kalhil Gibran wrote, “the more joy you can contain” — though that joy, I might add, may be delayed.
Those who lost family members, or lost jobs, or lost anything in 2020 can relate. Human life was the greatest casualty of the year, but hardly the only one. As case counts and hospitalizations rose, civility declined. A chasm emerged along social, political, even scientific lines — mask-wearers, social-distancers, public-health-official-trusters to one side, the “enlightened,” flag-waving, liberty-espousing to the other.
Soon, what should have been a unified effort to control a deadly pandemic split us into factions. By October, three-fourths of Americans said our country was more divided than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. Thousands of Americans died daily to a virus tens of thousands professed doesn’t exist. The public perception of our nation’s response to the virus — whether we responded poorly or well — was more divided than other countries. Americans united on one thing, though: agreeing that major divisions exist.
As a pair of political scientists explained in 2018, with their words gaining accuracy by the month, “Americans on both the left and the right now view their political opponents not as fellow Americans with differing views, but as enemies to be vanquished.”
Quite literally, Longfellow’s America was that phrase embodied. The Civil War would go on to take some 600,000 American lives over four years; in 10 months, COVID-19 has already taken half of that. Divisiveness was the theme of the season. And during a holiday time dedicated to bringing joy to the world, he felt none.
Still, in some paradoxical way, perhaps only attributable to divine intervention, Longfellow’s sorrow was replaced with peace. Those Christmas bells to him were a reminder of a lowly Infant born in the humblest of circumstances — into a world also marred by war and disease, yet redeemed by His message of hope.
At some point in the future — for some sooner, others later — the lessons of 2020 will be made clear. The loneliness of isolation will fade. The sting of losing loved ones will subside. The bitterness of disagreement and the chaos of polarity will disappear, and joy will take their place.
While this year has turned us all into experts in waiting — waiting for a COVID-19 vaccine, waiting for election results, waiting for a “new normal” — we miss opportunity when we focus on that wait itself. “The Lord’s mercy often rides to the door of our heart upon the black horse of affliction,” 19th-century preacher Charles Spurgeon wrote — and a consuming focus on the horse prevents us from seeing the rider.
Longfellow reminds us of that. The world can be dark — and our suffering severe — but we can still find joy in truth.
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”