John Dickson Bruns, M.D.
“Good-will and peace! peace and good-will!”
The burden of the Advent song,
What time the love-charmed waves grew still
To hearken to the shining throng;
The wondering shepherds heard the strain
Who watched by night the slumbering fleece,
The deep skies echoed the refrain,
“Peace and good-will, good-will and peace!”
And wise men hailed the promised sign,
And brought their birth-gifts from the East,
Dear to that Mother as the wine
That hallowed Cana’s bridal feast;
But what to these are myrrh or gold,
And what Arabia’s costliest gem,
Whose eyes the Child divine behold,
The blessed Babe of Bethlehem.
“Peace and good-will, good-will and peace!”
They sing, the bright ones overhead;
And scarce the jubilant anthems cease
Ere Judah wails her first-born dead;
And Rama’s wild, despairing cry
Fills with great dread the shuddering coast,
And Rachel hath but one reply,
“Bring back, bring back my loved and lost.”
So, down two thousand years of doom
That cry is borne on wailing winds,
But never star breaks through the gloom,
No cradled peace the watcher finds;
And still the Herodian steel is driven,
And breaking hearts make ceaseless moan,
And still the mute appeal to heaven
Man answers back with groan for groan.
How shall we keep our Christmas tide?
With that dread past, its wounds agape,
Forever walking by our side,
A fearful shade, an awful shape;
Can any promise of the spring
Make green the faded autumn leaf?
Or who shall say that time will bring
Fair fruit to him who sows but grief?
Wild bells! that shake the midnight air
With those dear tones that custom loves,
You wake no sounds of laughter here,
Nor mirth in all our silent groves;
On one broad waste, by hill or flood,
Of ravaged lands your music falls,
And where the happy homestead stood
The stars look down on roofless halls.
At every board a vacant chair
Fills with quick tears some tender eye,
And at our maddest sports appear
Those well-loved forms that will not die.
We lift the glass, our hand is stayed–
We jest, a spectre rises up–
And weeping, though no word is said,
We kiss and pass the silent cup,
And pledge the gallant friend who keeps
His Christmas-eve on Malvern’s height,
And him, our fair-haired boy, who sleeps
Beneath Virginian snows to-night;
While, by the fire, she, musing, broods
On all that was and might have been,
If Shiloh’s dank and oozing woods
Had never drunk that crimson stain.
O happy Yules of buried years!
Could ye but come in wonted guise,
Sweet as love’s earliest kiss appears,
When looking back through wistful eyes,
Would seem those chimes whose voices tell
His birth-night with melodious burst,
Who, sitting by Samaria’s well,
Quenched the lorn widow’s life-long thirst.
Ah! yet I trust that all who weep,
Somewhere, at last, will surely find
His rest, if through dark ways they keep
The child-like faith, the prayerful mind;
And some far Christmas morn shall bring
From human ills a sweet release
To loving hearts, while angels sing
“Peace and good-will, good-will and peace!”
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Analysis (AI Assisted)
This poem takes one of the most familiar Christian refrains—“peace and good-will”—and places it under pressure. From the opening stanza, the poet reminds the reader how closely the Christmas story is tied to promise and wonder, with angels, shepherds, and wise men forming a shared cultural memory of hope. But almost immediately, that hope is unsettled. The poem refuses to let the birth story stand alone as a symbol of comfort, insisting instead on remembering what followed just as quickly: fear, slaughter, and grief. In doing so, it frames Christmas not as an escape from suffering, but as something that has always existed beside it.
A key strength of the poem is how it collapses time. Biblical scenes move directly into the present without transition. Rachel’s ancient lament becomes the same cry heard “down two thousand years of doom.” This is not treated as metaphor alone; it feels like an accusation aimed at human history itself. The poem suggests that violence against the innocent is not an exception or a mistake, but a repeating pattern that no amount of religious language has yet stopped. The angels’ song echoes endlessly, but the world keeps answering it with steel.
The speaker’s struggle is not disbelief, but exhaustion. The central question—how to keep Christmas at all—feels honest rather than rhetorical. Bells still ring, customs still exist, but they land on “ravaged lands” and roofless homes. The poem does not reject tradition outright, but it shows how hollow ritual can feel when it no longer matches lived reality. Even joy becomes haunted. Vacant chairs, interrupted toasts, and half-finished jokes all show how grief intrudes on moments meant for celebration.
What grounds the poem emotionally is its domestic detail. The losses are not abstract casualties but specific people: friends on distant hills, sons buried under snow, memories of how life might have gone differently. Shiloh is named not for strategy or outcome, but as a place where the land itself absorbed blood. This keeps the poem firmly rooted in the aftermath of war rather than its causes or arguments. The pain is private, repeated in homes rather than shouted in public.
Despite its heaviness, the poem does not end in denial or despair. The final stanzas turn carefully toward faith, but it is a chastened faith. There is no claim that suffering is justified or redeemed in any simple way. Instead, the hope offered is deferred and conditional. Peace may come, but not here, not yet, and not without endurance. What matters is holding onto belief without pretending that belief has already solved anything.
As a war poem, this piece is notable for how little it describes combat and how much it focuses on what follows. The war’s presence is felt through absence, memory, and ritual broken by loss. By pairing the Christmas narrative with modern grief, the poem exposes the tension between spiritual promise and historical reality. Its power lies in refusing easy comfort while still allowing space for a hope that has not yet been earned, but is not fully abandoned.