Some New Year Readings

Angels of the Uprising: The Courageous Children of Warsaw – The Historian’s Magazine. 

On the Threshold of Bag End – E.R. Scrivener at Story Warren.

 

“A Conceited Mediocrity”: The Story of Tchaikovsky and Brahms – Richard Nilson at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

“The Darkling Thrust,” poem by Thomas Hardy – Malcolm Guite.

 

Up-Hill – poem by Christina Rossetti at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

“Auld Lang Syne,” poem by Robert Burns – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

My New New Year – poem by Susan Jarvis Bryant at Society of Classical Poets.

 

The dock – poem by Christopher Hewitt at The New Criterion.

 

Auld Lang Syne – The Choral Singers of University College Dublin

 Photograph: Thomas Hardy as a young man, about 1866.

Some Monday Readings - Dec. 2, 2024

St. Hedwig’s: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place – Rod Dreher at The European Conservative. 

The John le Carre Advent Calendar – Tom Gauld at The Guardian.

 

An Education in Thanksgiving – Rachel Alexander Cambre at Law & Liberty on Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter. 

 

Advent Sunday: Christina Rossetti – Malcolm Guite.

 

Finding Order in the Pieces – John Wilson at First Things Magazine.

 

Britain Votes for Death – The Four Discoursemen. 

 

Crossing the Thames at Woolwich – A London Inheritance.

 

Connect Before You Ask – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

 

A Look Back at the Battle of Franklin – Emerging Civil War.

 

Plainsong – poem by Donald Platt at The New Criterion. 

 

Top illustration: Christina Rossetti.

Learning about Christmas Poems

You think you everything there is know about Christmas poems, and then you find out you don’t.

Until fairly recently, it was believed that the most famous Christmas poem of all – A Visit from St. Nicholas – was written by poet Clement Clark Moore (1779-1863). Later scholarship has suggested the real author to be Henry Livingston Jr. (1748-1828), a farmer, surveyor and justice of the peace in New York who joined the Revolutionary Army in 1775.

What we do know for certain is that Moore read the poem to his children for Christmas in 1822, and it was published anonymously in 1823 in the Troy (NY) Sentinel. The Sentinel editor did not know who the author was, only that it had been sent anonymously to him in the mail. And we know this poem, more than any other account, fixed forever many of the characteristics attributed to Santa Claus. The poem was published in many publications (copyright laws being what they were), until a bound and illustrated version appeared in 1848.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Artwork by John A. Hows from Christmas In Art And Song. New York: The Arundel Printing and Publishing Company, 1879.