I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day

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There is a deep nostalgia I have wrapped in Christmas songs. I remember the huge stack of Christmas vinyl records that we would put on our family record player, letting them roll while the fire crackled in the fireplace. We’d listen to the classic carols and then also some really goofy songs that always made us laugh like, “I Want A Hippopotamus for Christmas.”

I love when songs have a story that roots their meaning in more than just a rhyme and the Christmas season is full of them even amidst songs about Santa and hippos.

There is one song in particular that I rarely listen through without being moved. The turn of the lyrics is so strong and purposeful. It doesn’t tell the original story of Christmas, but is more about what the birth of Jesus meant and continues to mean.

“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” was a song written from a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow back in 1863. No doubt, you ran across Longfellow’s works such as “Paul Revere’s Ride” back in high school or college in an English class, but the poem entitled “Christmas Bells” was written from a moment of epiphany in his own life on Christmas Day in 1863.

The United States was squarely in the middle of the terror of the Civil War. There was a lack of unity across the whole country. Loss, pain, and frustration were everywhere. Longfellow himself had lost his wife in a fire two years earlier, and he had just received word that his son had been badly wounded in battle. He was struggling with severe depression over these losses. But then on Christmas morning, ringing through the cold air, he heard the church bells playing, inspiring him to pen these words:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day

Their old, familiar carols play, 

and wild and sweet

The words repeat

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,

The belfries of all Christendom 

Had rolled along

The unbroken song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,

The world revolved from night to day,

A voice, a chime,

A chant sublime

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth

The cannon thundered in the South, 

And with the sound

The carols drowned

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent

The hearth-stones of a continent,

And made forlorn

The households born

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;

“There is no peace on earth,” I said; 

“For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; 

The Wrong shall fail,

The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

I love how he spends most of the piece outlining the utter atrocities of the world around him. He paints a picture of how the world felt: bleak and hopeless. But that depth makes the turn of the final refrain all the more beautiful because we know that the truth of the line “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep” destroys any depth of pain. The God of Heaven sits enthroned above any act here on earth.

Hope is what Christmas is all about. Hope that was born to a virgin. Hope that took on flesh.

It might feel like this poem/song seems to be reading the headlines of 2020.

And in despair I bowed my head;

“There is no peace on earth,” I said; 

“For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

 

But, if we can be reminded of anything this Christmas, it’s that the true hope we find in the advent of Jesus was not only greater than the darkness that Longfellow faced when he wrote those lines, but that it still shines the light of hope into our world and hearts today.

 

Aric Harding
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