My Blog-Worthy Life: CHRISTMAS DAY 18 – I HEARD THE BELLS ON CHRISTMAS DAY

WHO REALLY WROTE I HEARD THE BELLS ON CHRISTMAS DAY? - By Douglas M. Campbell

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow did not write the Christmas carol “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” despite the use of his name as lyricist. He did write the poem “Christmas Bells,” but an unknown reviser converted his personal poem into a universal hymn.

The story begins in April of 1835. Longfellow was 28 and a recognized American writer when he and Mary, his first wife, left Cambridge, Mass., for a 20-month grand tour of Europe. In November, only eight months into the tour, Mary died suddenly in Amsterdam. Longfellow continued his tour, crisscrossing Europe, hoping to recover from the grief of his wife’s death.

The same November that Mary died, 19-year-old Fanny (Frances Elizabeth) Appleton and her family left Boston to begin a 21-month grand tour of Europe. Eight months later, in July 1836, Fanny’s father met Longfellow in Switzerland. Fanny was not impressed by her father’s chance meeting. She recorded in her journal of July 20, 1836: “Professor Longfellow sends up his card to Father. Hope he venerable gentleman won’t pop in on us, though I did like his Oure Mer.”

Fanny herself first met Henry at Interlaken, Switzerland, on July 31. Henry plunged into a whirlwind courtship, and when he left three weeks later she recorded:”[I] miss Mr. L. considerable.” Nevertheless, she remained with her family in Europe for 12 more months.

Two years after her return, Longfellow published Hyperion, a novel with Fanny as heroine and him as hero, in which the hero wooed the heroine across Europe. The real-life heroine was not amused by such public courtship. After Longfellow sent her a copy, she wrote a personal review to a friend in August 1839. “There really are some exquisite things in this book, though it is desultory, objectless, a thing of shreds and patches like the author’s mind.” Miffed, Fanny snubbed Henry’s Boston visits for the next four years. Henry busied himself with his duties as a professor at Harvard.

But who knows the mind of an unmarried woman in New England in the 1840s? Seven years after their first meeting, Fanny, now 26, suddenly changed her mind about the 36-year-old Henry. A few days before her brother’s departure for Europe, at a chance meeting in Cambridge, Fanny took the initiative and mentioned to Henry how lonely she expected to be and added, “You must come and comfort me, Mr. Longfellow.”

Henry came. Within a month she had accepted his proposal in a handwritten note. They set the wedding day for the end of the school year. Harvard and other colleges ended school much later in the 1840s, and the couple was married in Cambridge on a beautiful summer day, the first day of Harvard College’s vacation, July 13, 1843. Fanny’s father, a wealthy merchant, gave them the well-known and historical Craigie House in Cambridge as a wedding present.

The Craigie House became a home, their home. With marriage came children. Henry recorded his reaction to his first child, Charles, in his journal on June 9, 1844: “Thank Heaven! It is all over. He was born at one o’clock today; and I came very near sending him out of the world as soon as he had cleverly gotten into it; for, leaning over the bed to kiss Fanny, I nearly put my elbow onto his little head, not seeing him there.”

Fanny recorded her first Christmas with Charles, Dec. 25, 1844: “If our Father in Heaven feels anything like the joy over his children we have over our single one, what an infinity of happiness is his. I can now better understand his long-suffering patience with our infirmities.”

Another son, Ernest, quickly followed. More than the usual excitement accompanied the birth of their third child, their first girl, as Fanny was the first North American woman to bear a child under the influence of ether. Puritan New England was not pleased by this lifting of Eve’s curse. Fanny wrote to her sister-in-law: “I am very sorry you all thought me so rash and naughty in trying the ether. Henry’s faith gave me courage, and I had heard such a thing had succeeded abroad, where the surgeons extend this blessing much more boldly and universally than our timid doctors . . . . This is certainly the greatest blessing of this age.”

Unfortunately, this baby, also named Fanny, lived only a year. But soon the Longfellows had a family of five: two boys, Charley and Ernest, and three girls, Alice, Edith, and Allegra. Henry’s domestic happiness was full.

By 1860 both Longfellow and the nation were at a kind of peak. “Evangeline,” “Hiawatha,” and “The Courtship of Miles Standish” had given him fame; his wife and children had given him domestic happiness. The United States was experiencing the settlement of the Midwest, the expansion to the West, the voluminous exportation of cotton from the South, and the increased industrial exports of the North.

But the winds of fate had begun to blow. Longfellow was to see both the tranquility of his family and the tranquility of his country shattered within the three months between April 12, 1861, and July 10, 1861. Consider the following four extracts from his journal (emphasis has been added throughout this article by italic type).

Nov. 7, 1860: “Lincoln is elected. Overwhelming majorities in New York and Pennsylvania. This is a great victory, one can hardly overrate its importance. It is the redemption of the country. Freedom is triumphant.”

Feb. 22, 1861: “Washington’s birthday. Heard the bells ringing at sunrise, through the crimson eastern sky. They had a sad sound, reminding one of the wretched treason in the land.”

On April 12, 1861, Longfellow and the nation reeled from the unthinkable, a nation divided by civil war. He recorded: “News comes that Fort Sumter is attached. And so the war begins! Who can forsee the end?”

June 19, 1861: “If one could only foresee one’s fate!”

On Tuesday, July 9, 1861, less than three months after Fort Sumter’s fall had destroyed the nation’s peace, Fanny and Henry busied themselves as usual in Craigie House. The Cambridge summer heat and humidity were miserable. Only the day before Fanny had written: “We are all sighing for the good sea breeze instead of this stifling land one filled with dust. If I could have known the heat would last so long, I should have tried to get down a week sooner. . . . Poor Annie [Allegra] is very droopy with the heat, and Edie [Edith] has to get her hair in a net to free her neck from it’s weight.”

That Tuesday Henry was at work in the study next to the library. Fanny, wearing a light summer dress, sat in the late summer afternoon at a small table before an open window in the library. Edith, 7, and Allegra, 5, stood at their mother’s side. Earlier Fanny had tried to make Edie a bit more comfortable in the unrelieved summer heat by trimming her hair.

Fanny took the trimmed curls of Edie’s summer-bleached hair and lit a candle to melt a bar of sealing wax. She started to seal a set of the curls in a small paper package. Drops of burning wax fell unnoticed on her dress. Through the open window gusted the good sea breeze for which they had been longing. Suddenly, the light material of her dress caught fire. In an instant, she was wrapped in a sheet of flame. Trying to protect the two girls, she ran with a piercing cry to the study next door where Henry sat. He sprang up, grabbed a throw rug from the floor, and threw it around her. It was too small. She broke away, flew toward the entry, then turned and rushed back to him. He embraced her, protecting her face and part of her body. Dreadfully burned, she collapsed, she was carried to her room.

Henry first sent for the family’s Cambridge doctor, then for a second Cambridge doctor, and finally for a doctor from Boston. In the hope of reducing the shock, the doctors sedated both Fanny and Henry with ether. The next morning, she woke for a few moments, slipped into a coma, and died from the burns before ten o’clock.

Three days later, Saturday, July 13, 1861, on what would have been their 18th wedding anniversary, the family held Fanny’s funeral in the Craigie House library, the same room where the tragedy had occurred. Longfellow, too ill from burns and grief to attend, could only listen from a makeshift bed in the adjoining study.

Longfellow wrote nothing for months, and nothing ever of the ninth and tenth of July 1861. When one visitor expressed hope that Longfellow would bear his cross patiently, he responded, “Bear the cross, yea; but what if one is stretched on it?” The burns on his face made it impossible for him to shave, and he grew the full beard that people today think he had always worn.

Like all citizens, Longfellow had experienced the loss of national peace with the outbreak of the Civil War. But now he had also experienced the loss of personal peace, had felt it dying within his own arms. Could he regain Eden, or did he have to experience more before receiving a catharsis? These extracts from his journal help to tell the story.

Dec. 25, 1861: [The first Christmas after Fanny’s death.] “How inexpressibly sad are all holidays!”

May 8, 1862: [The reasons for the Civil War were never far from his mind.] “I saw lately at a jeweler’s a slave’s collar of iron, with an iron tongue as large as a spoon to go into the mouth. Every drop of blood in me quivered! The world forgets what slavery really is!”

July 10, 1862: [The first anniversary of Fanny’s death.] “I can make no record of those days. Better leave them wrapped in silence. Perhaps some day God will give me peace.”

Sept. 1, 1862: [The War did not leave him alone.] “I thought in the night of the pale upturned faces of young men dead on the battlefield, and the agonies of the wounded, and my wretchedness was very great. Every shell from the cannon’s mouth bursts not only on the battle-field, but in far-away homes, North and South, carrying dismay and death.”

Dec. 25, 1862: [His second Christmas without Fanny.] “’A merry Christmas’ say the children, but that is no more for me.”

During the third Christmas season he experienced the war personally.

Dec. 1, 1863: “At dinner received a telegram from Washington stating that Charles [their oldest son who had run away to join the Union army] had been severely wounded.”

Dec. 3, 1863: “. . . went in pursuit of Charles.”

Dec. 4, 1863: “No wounded arrive.”

Dec. 5, 1863: “The train came . . . [with] Charles. Charles [is wounded] through both shoulders-an Enfield ball entering under the left shoulder-blade and passing directly through the back, taking off one of the spinal processes, and passing out under the right shoulder-blade.”

Dec. 8, 1863: “Leave for home with [Charles].”

Charles Longfellow

Dec. 9, 1863: “Reached home [with Charles].”

Longfellow made no journal record at all for this third Christmas Day. But after the passage of another year, Longfellow records some good news.

Nov. 10, 1864: “Lincoln re-elected beyond a doubt. We breathe freer. The country will be saved.”

Finally, the fourth Christmas after Fanny’s death, the fourth Christmas of the Civil War, on Christmas Day of 1864, in a burst Longfellow wrote the seven-stanza “Christmas-Bells.” In it we see three years of personal and national travail echoed.

The first three stanzas of “Christmas-Bells” capture the peace that the United States and Longfellow had enjoyed before 1861. The fourth and fifth stanzas are the dramatic break; the disappearance of Eden. The sixth stanza is the natural personal response—despair—a despair that he and the nation had undergone for three years. But today is Christmas: Charlie is home from the war, Lincoln has been reelected, time has healed henry’s hurt heart. In response, stanza seven is a statement of personal grace, a gift of optimism, a personal revelation without details of hints as to how the Wrong will fail, nor how the Right will prevail.

“Christmas-Bells” is a personal and particular poem, from a particular time, for particular reasons. Written four months before the end of the Civil War, it is a poem of trust—without particular knowledge of how things will actually turn out.

Longfellow published the poem in 1867, two years after the war ended. But about 1872, seven years after the end of the Civil War, the poem appeared as a popular hymn set to music. As had happened with other Longfellow poems, an unknown reviser had converted the poem into a hymn. The conversion to “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” was done by changing a word of stanza two, deleting the fourth and fifth stanzas, and moving the third stanza to the end. The changes seem small; the effect is immense.

In the reviser’s hymn, the first two stanzas take place every Christmas Day. By 1872, the passage of 11 years since the start of the Civil War had dulled the shock of the cannon’s roar for Americans, and the poem’s fourth and fifth stanzas were deleted. The sixth stanza of the poem became the third stanza of the hymn. For us, singing it 120 years later, outside of any historical context, the hymn’s third stanza seems a personal confession of despair at the failure of the Christian message referred to in the first two stanzas.

The poem’s seventh stanza became the hymn’s fourth stanza and now become a call to repentance, a call for optimism, a call to transcend little local civil wars or tiny tragic personal deaths.

Longfellow had ended his poem with this seventh stanza. He had not been bothered by the fact that the Civil War wasn’t over, nor by the lack of details included within his personal faith that the Right would prevail. His moment of personal grace had left him without doubt.

But people prefer the inevitable to the merely hoped. And the reviser in 1872 had more than hope. The war was over. The future was clear. The 1872 American audience lived after the time when night had turned to day, when once again bells sang of peace on earth. So the poem’s third stanza was made the hymn’s fifth stanza. The world had indeed revolved from night to day.

The personal, particular, dated elements of the poem, nearly obscure by 1872, are now long gone. What some unknown hand designed for a post-Civil War audience has mutated into a universal hymn for the late 20th century.

CHRISTMAS BELLS (original)

I heard the bells on Christmas Day

Their old, familiar carols play,

And wild and sweet

The words repeat