Today’s Poem: A Visit from St. Nicholas

’Twas the night before . . . oh, you know how it goes

Santa Claus in a 1904 Puck magazine cover (Wikimedia Commons)

A Visit from St. Nicholas

by Clement Clarke Moore

’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds;
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And mamma in her ’kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap,
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,
Gave a lustre of midday to objects below,
When what to my wondering eyes did appear,
But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer,
With a little old driver so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment he must be St. Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:
“Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donner and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!”
As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the housetop the coursers they flew
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too —
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a pedler just opening his pack.
His eyes — how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly
That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight —
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”
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Well, there we are. Except perhaps for “Casey at the Bat,” the best-known American poem is “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” The most referenced, the most partially recited, the most assumed to be recognized by other Americans: It is the embodiment of the shared knowledge required for cultural literacy.

In a sour mood, we could take that as an indictment — a minor set of newspaper verses, of no particular literary depth, standing as one of America’s chief national poems. But it’s Christmastime, here at Poems Ancient and Modern, and God keep us from any such dismissive thought. Come, reject with me the sour. Eschew the cynical. Embrace the silliness of the season. Tastefulness is just small-mindedness pretending to be art, and Christmas isn’t supposed to be tasteful. It’s vulgar and wild and earthy, as one should expect in a human celebration of the moment the divine entered history and the physical world. We will escape the sadness. / There lives now grace and gladness.

There’s some disagreement about the poem’s name. The title on its original 1823 newspaper publication was “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” but later years (and endless pirated reprintings) have often renamed it “The Night Before Christmas” or “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” or “A Visit from St. Nick.”

And then there’s the argument about authorship, with some attempt in recent decades to claim that the actual author is Henry Livingston, and not Clement Clarke Moore (1779–1863), the traditionally assumed author of the originally anonymous poem.

Clement Clarke Moore (Wikimedia Commons)

Bah. Humbug. No one without seasonal dyspepsia much cares, and we will not let our enjoyment of America’s best-known Christmas verse be stolen from us by the nitpickers. Were we to do some scholarship about the poem, we’d note the Dutch vs. German names for the reindeer and the occasional bowdlerizations that would cut “the breast of the new fallen snow” and “prancing and pawing,” along with replacing the perceived British “Happy” with the contemporary American “Merry” in the last line.

But mostly it’s the success of the story-telling meter that should be noticed. Written in the comic tradition of rollicking anapests (with the easy iambic substitutions allowed by the form), the tetrameter lines romp through 28 rhymed couplets of light-hearted, good-hearted verse. And why not simply enjoy it? “Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen! / On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donner and Blitzen!”

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