Audiobook · read by volunteers
Christmas Bells
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
Read by Annie Coleman Rothenberg, Catharine Eastman, Claire Goget, Douglas D. Anderson, JemmaBlythe, Kristin Hughes (1974-2021), Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), Rebecca Dekker, William Haseltine · 9 chapters · 16 min
About the book
On Christmas Day, a man sits listening to the church bells, and hears in them the message of peace on earth. Then the news of the war in the country returns to his mind, and for a moment the bells seem to mock him. But the poem does not end in despair.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote “Christmas Bells” during the American Civil War, and it became familiar as a carol. This collection brings together nine different recordings of the poem, each by a different volunteer reader, and the whole thing takes less than twenty minutes.
Listening to several versions in a row is a quiet pleasure. The words are the same, but the voices, the pace and the shades of feeling vary from reader to reader. A short, gentle collection for the festive season, or for any day that could use a little hope.
Introduction
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was one of the most popular American poets of the nineteenth century. A professor at Harvard, he wrote narrative poems such as The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline and The Courtship of Miles Standish, and his work was widely read on both sides of the Atlantic. He was the first American to be honoured with a bust in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.
“Christmas Bells” was written in 1863 and published in 1865, during the American Civil War. The poem was composed at a difficult time for the poet, whose son had been seriously wounded in the conflict. In it, the sound of the bells at Christmas is first heard as a message of peace, then drowned out by the noise of war, and finally restored in the closing lines, which affirm that wrong will not triumph. The poem was later set to music and became known as the carol “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”.
This recording is a multi-version project in which nine LibriVox volunteers each read the same poem. It began as a weekly poetry project in December 2006, and the whole collection lasts under twenty minutes. Hearing the poem several times in different voices gives a sense of how much interpretation can differ, even when the text is the same.
It is a short, easy listen, well suited to the Christmas season, and a good way to discover a poem that is more complex than its familiar carol form suggests.
Public domain
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow died in 1882: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text