(This post was inspired by a conversation with Jennifer Birdsong. Most all of the historical facts were cut and pasted and sometimes summarized from here.)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow tried to extinguish the flames that were enveloping his wife, first with a rug and then with his own body, but it wasn’t enough.

She died the next morning, on July 10th, 1861 from severe burns. Henry Longfellow couldn’t attend her funeral because his own face was burnt so badly - his familiar beard was grown in an attempt to cover the scars on his face. Over the following years, Longfellow would often fear that he would be sent to an asylum on account of his grief.

He was now a single parent of five children: two boys and three girls (ages 13, 10, 8—there had been a fourth, but she died as an infant), and his trials were far from over.

In March of 1863, less than two years later, Wadsworth’s eldest son Charles would walk out of the family’s house - unbeknownst to anyone—board a train bound for Washington, D.C. and join President Lincoln’s Union army and the battles of the Civil War. Before the year’s end, he would be back in D.C. in intensive care.

While dining at home on December 1, 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow received a telegram that Charles had been severely wounded four days earlier.

During the battle of the Mine Run Campaign, Charley was shot through the left shoulder, with the bullet exiting under his right shoulder blade. It had traveled across his back and skimmed his spine. Charley avoided being paralyzed by less than an inch.

Charley was carried into New Hope Church (Orange County, Virginia) and then transported to the Rapidan River then Washington D.C. where Henry and Charley’s younger brother, Ernest, met him on December 5. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was alarmed when informed by the army surgeon that his son’s wound “was very serious” and that “paralysis might ensue,” but three surgeons gave a more favorable report that evening, suggesting a recovery that would require him to be “long in healing,” at least six months.

On Christmas day, 1863, Longfellow—a 57-year-old widowed father of six children, the oldest of which had been nearly paralyzed as his country fought a war against itself—wrote a poem seeking to capture the dynamic and dissonance in his own heart and the world he observed around him. He heard the Christmas bells that December day and the singing of “peace on earth” (Luke 2:14), but he observed the world of injustice and violence that seemed to mock the truthfulness of this optimistic outlook.

He penned these words:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day

Their old, familiar carols play,

and wild and sweet

The words repeat