Today's poem was written in 1863 in the midst of the American Civil War. Two years before writing the poem Longfellow's second wife, to whom he was very devoted, was fatally burned in an accidental fire. Then when war was declared, his oldest son, Charles Appleton Longfellow, joined the Union Army without his father's blessing and in late November 1863, he was severely wounded in the Battle of Mine Run. On December 1, Longfellow received a telegram notifying him of his son's wounds, with the army surgeon suggesting that he might be paralysed, because the bullet had narrowly missed his spinal cord. Longfellow then wrote the poem on Christmas Day itself, although it wasn't published until February 1865. As I say in the video it has become enormously popular especially in America, and has been set to music a number of times (and after hearing Casting Crown's version of it I previously wrote about it ) but in many of the sung versions the references to the Civil War rarely included, yet for me that is the very point of the poem. Without that juxtaposition it is merely sentimental... and as such I doubt I would have included it in this series of poems.
Shalom
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