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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from [VerseNotes][vn]. I’m Jerry Towler, and today we’re talking about I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, a carol that sounds cheerful, but underneath it turns out it’s a war-soaked lament with a burst of resurrection hope at the very end.

[vn]:

If you want to listen to the song before we dive in, you’ll find some links in the show notes.

Now, this song looks like a Christmas song. It’s definitely about Christmas, but at its core, it’s a Civil War poem dressed up as a carol.

The opening verses feel gentle. They talk about “old familiar carols” and bells rolling across Christendom, a continual dawn-to-dusk soundtrack of peace on earth, goodwill to men. The author paints Christmas as it should be: simple, sweet, expected. This is, you know, the Christmas of memory, or maybe the Christmas we wish that we could return to, but that calm is the calm before the storm, which beautifully makes it Advent. It’s longing. It’s waiting. It’s imagining the world as it ought to be, not the world that we actually live in.

Now, here’s the part that you’ve almost certainly never heard. The original poem actually has seven verses. Most musical versions only use four. Bing Crosby used four; Sarah McLachlan used four; even Casting Crowns and Chris Tomlin, which switch up the order a little bit. All of them actually skip the verses about the war.

But the author of the poem, the great Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, did not. These verses were his reality when he wrote it in 1863. Let me just read them to you.

From each black accursed mouth,
the cannon thundered in the south,
and with the sound,
the carols drowned,
of peace on earth, goodwill to men.

It was as if an earthquake rent
the hearthstones of a continent,
and made forlorn
the households born
of peace on earth, goodwill to men.

I’d never heard those words until I looked them up this year. That’s not a Christmas carol. That’s a battlefield.

And suddenly, the carol starts to make a little bit more sense. The music that we know is upbeat, if a little bit slow, but the poem is not. Without those lines, that despair in Crosby’s third verse, which is actually Longfellow’s sixth verse, comes out of absolutely nowhere.

Longfellow is writing about Advent realism. This world, which is meant for peace, is instead soaked in blood. And then, right after those verses that I just read, we get to the emotional center of the poem that all these musicians can’t wait to sing: “And in despair, I bowed my head.” But Longfellow’s not thinking about bells or melodies or carols. He’s collapsing under the weight of real despair.

And he had his reasons. His wife had died in a fire two years earlier. In fact, he was burned trying to save her. He grew that famous beard that you see in every portrait of him to cover the burn scars. I bet you’ve never seen him without that bushy beard.

His teenage son had just been injured in battle a few weeks before Christmas, in a battle called Mine Run in Orange County, Virginia, which had shockingly low casualties, except for Charles Longfellow.

And the nation, by the way, was tearing itself apart. At Christmas 1863, Gettysburg had just happened earlier that summer, and the casualty lists were endless.

Longfellow wrote, “Hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth.” That is the darkness of Advent. That is Psalm 13:1-2 singing, “How long, O Lord?” That is the groaning without words of Romans 8:22.

But like Advent, and like Scripture, the poem keeps moving. It follows that Heaven to earth, to despair, to restoration pattern. The first three verses are that unbroken song of Christmas we talked about. And then the verses 4 and 5 that everybody skips are the plunge into war and sin. And verse 6, which you’ve heard, is midnight, the despair, the darkness.

But Longfellow doesn’t leave us there, and neither does Advent, and neither does God.

Verse 7 is the dawn. The bells break through again, louder and deeper.

God is not dead, nor doth he sleep.

That line is the gospel in eight words. Objective truth cutting through subjective despair. And also, doesn’t it sound suspiciously like Easter? God’s not dead; the tomb is empty. That’s resurrection. Showing up in a Christmas carol.

Ray Bradbury, the famous novelist, once wrote that this song is “for all seasons.” And he was right. But I think it’s especially for Advent, because it refuses sentimentality. It refuses to pretend that everything’s fine just because the lights are pretty and the cocoa is hot.

Advent is honest. Life is dark. War rages. Maybe there’s no civil war going on this year, or maybe there is. Hate mocks the song.

But Advent is also defiant. The bells insist this is not the final world.

This is a carol for anyone who’s ever looked at the news and thought, “Is any of this fixable?” The bells, they say yes. Not because we are any good at fixing things, because obviously we’re not. And not because bells have magic; obviously they don’t.

But because Christ is coming.

Longfellow wrote this poem on Christmas Day in 1863, just weeks after learning that his son had been wounded, and just a couple of years after losing his wife, and in the middle, in the thick of a war—the Civil War—that seemed endless.

It wasn’t set to music until a couple of years later in the 1870s, and it actually didn’t become popular until 1956, when Johnny Marks, who’s the same guy who wrote Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, gave it the melody that we all know. And of course, now you know, Bing Crosby only sang the hopeful verses, right? So that explains why so many of us missed the war part entirely, including me.

But the war matters, because Christmas is not about tinsel or niceness. It’s about salvation from despair and sin and death. It’s about the God who refuses to leave the world broken, as it is.

So this carol, which is a cheerful melody built on a poem about a battlefield, declares that evil does not get the last word. The bells have already told us the last word.

“Wrong shall fail. Right shall prevail.” Christ is coming.

And that’s why we sing.

Thanks for joining me today for Advent of Carols. If you’d like to help make more projects like this possible, check out Advent Commons at versenotes.org/commons. And we’ll be back tomorrow with another carol of Christmas.

If you’ve got thoughts about today’s carol, I’d love to hear them. You can always reach me at [email protected].

And if you enjoyed the episode, the best gift you can give me is to pass it along to someone else who would enjoy it too.

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