Sunday, December 25, 2016

Christmas Bells

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I HEARD the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

14 comments:


  1. πŸ•―Merry Chanukah & Happy Christmas! πŸŽ„

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  2. Good poem choice for this year, Cat! πŸŽ„πŸŽ„πŸŽ„

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  3. πŸŒŸπŸŽ„πŸ’πŸŒŸπŸŽ„πŸ’πŸŒŸπŸŽ„πŸ’πŸŒŸ

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  4. Happy Christmas, my friends.

    Puddle, I couldn't agree more with your comment on the last thread. Children need to be loved. What a pity there's such a terrible lot of hate in our world.

    ReplyDelete

  5. Turkey *almost done*--whew.

    Wonderfully quiet day: just perfect for an introvert, grin.

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  6. This is the fifth or sixth time I have posted this set of links (vide infra), re disappeared jobs (harking back to my borrowed link of yesterday which has also disappeared). Blogger must be part of the great right-wing conspiracy... I will try posting it all with one link at a time, carefully waiting for page to complete loading first each time.

    Turkey dinner taken care of, Artist Daughter setting up Mom's iPad for/with her. Sandy Claws didn't bring the pen I ordered from Italy; he must have handed it off to the Three Wise Men to deliver for Old Christmas.

    Clear if chilly weather here today; for those who wish to disport themselves in the snow, it is less than an hour's drive up into the mountains.

    --Alan

    Here's a link sent to me by a correspondent in Montana:
    Coal jobs were lost to automation, not trade [Click]

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  7. And the final three:

    Universal basic income experiments in The Netherlands [Click]


    The Future of Robot Labor Is the Future of Capitalism [Click]

    Here's what Karl Marx wrote about the subject in 1857 [!]: The Fragment on Machines [Click] from The Grundrisse [Click], which is the outline of all Marx's economic ideas, that went unpublished until 1939, and was not published in English until 1973. Typically turgid prose, but as is typical for Marxism, others have simplified it (vide supra).

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  8. Progressive causes see 'unprecedented' upswing in donations after US election [Click]
    "The ACLU donations web page crashed the day after the election as visitors increased by 7,000%, and in the next five days it raised more than $7m from 120,000 donors."


    --Alan

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, I made a special contribution to the ACLU, over and above annual dues, in the week following the election. And I expect to make more in the coming year. But I am not comfortable with the ACLU being described as a "progressive organization." Our fundamental civil rights should not be a matter of partisan ideology, and the ACLU does not regard them as such.

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    2. Quite so, Bill. I excerpted that sentence because it seemed the most striking.

      Alan

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