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Robert Pinsky, Phillips Brooks, and Bethlehem. Robert Pinsky's thoughts from Christmastime last year:

The words of Phillips Brooks's Christmas carol, "O Little Town of Bethlehem" have had a mysterious power for me since I first heard them sung, as a small child.

Brooks, I later learned, wrote the carol as a poem on a visit to Bethlehem in 1868. He was most famous in his time for a sermon he delivered, in that same period, on the subject of the Civil War dead.

Now I associate the silent, dark streets he describes with the silence of the young men missing from little towns all over the North and the South:

O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by;
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee to-night.

See you in 2004 — a monumentally important year for all our hopes and fears.

{ 6:11 PM }

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