Length5h 15m

About this audiobook

The Bethlehem Carols gathers more than 150 Christmas carols, songs, and poems into a capacious literary celebration of the Holy Night. Its pages move between devotional lyric, narrative ballad, hymn, children's verse, pastoral reverie, and Victorian sentiment, tracing Bethlehem as both sacred locale and imaginative symbol. Familiar nativity scenes, angels' announcements, winter landscapes, and domestic rituals recur in varied registers, while the collection's breadth reveals how Christmas writing mediates theology, memory, wonder, and communal song. The contributors span several centuries of English-language literature, bringing Romantic reflection, Victorian moral feeling, ballad traditions, religious poetry, and later popular verse into productive proximity. Canonical poets appear beside hymn writers, editors, and makers of children's literature, underscoring the collective character of Christmas culture rather than a single literary lineage. Their diverse backgrounds illuminate the changing devotional and social uses of seasonal verse: private meditation and public worship, national tradition and household festivity, inherited sacred narrative and imaginative renewal. This volume is especially rewarding for readers seeking a broad literary archive of Christmas expression in one book. It offers students, enthusiasts, and general readers an opportunity to compare forms and periods, to recognize recurring motifs across distinct voices, and to consider how poetry and song sustain a shared yet continually evolving holiday tradition. Its internal dialogue makes it both a pleasurable seasonal companion and a valuable resource for literary and cultural study.

Audiobook details

GenrePoetry
Length5 hrs 15 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateNov 27, 2020
LanguageEnglish

Table of contents

1The Complete Poetical Works of Rabindranath Tagore (Annotated)
2Silent Night
3The Three Kings (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
4Christmas Bells (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
5Christmas At Sea (Robert Louis Stevenson)
Show all chapters
6Angels from the Realms of Glory (James Montgomery)
7Christmas in the Olden Time (Sir Walter Scott)
8Marmion: A Christmas Poem (Sir Walter Scott)
9Old Santa Claus (Clement Clarke Moore)
10The Twelve Days of Christmas
11Minstrels (William Wordsworth)
12Ring Out, Wild Bells (Alfred Lord Tennyson)
13Christmas In India (Rudyard Kipling)
14Hymn On The Morning Of Christ's Nativity (John Milton)
15A Christmas Carol (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
16The Oxen (Thomas Hardy)
17A Christmas Ghost Story (Thomas Hardy)
18The Savior Must Have Been A Docile Gentleman (Emily Dickinson)
19'Twas just this time, last year, I died (Emily Dickinson)
20The Magi (William Butler Yeats)
21The Mahogany Tree (William Makepeace Thackeray)
22A Bell (Clinton Scollard)
23Christmas Carol (Sara Teasdale)
24The Mystic’s Christmas (John Greenleaf Whittier)
25Christmas Cheer (Thomas Tusser)
26Noel: Christmas Eve 1913 (Robert Seymour Bridges)
27The Holly and the Ivy
28Adam lay ybounden
29Christmas Day (Charles Kingsley)
30Christmas Fancies (Ella Wheeler Wilcox)
31Twas jolly, jolly Wat (C. W. Stubbs)
32A Tale Of Christmas Eve (William Topaz McGonagall)
33Jest 'Fore Christmas (Eugene Field)
34A Christmas Folksong (Paul Laurence Dunbar)
35As with Gladness Men of Old (William Chatterton Dix)
36Nativity a Christmas (John Donne)
37Boar's Head Carol
38Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus (Charles Wesley)
39Coventry Carol
40Here We Come A-wassailing
41A Defective Santa Claus (James Whitcomb Riley)
42King Winter
43Christmas Gifts and Other Poems (Carolyn Wells)
44The Night After Christmas (Anonymous)
45O Little Town of Bethlehem (Phillips Brooks)
46The Shepherds (William Drummond)
47A Christmas Carol (James Russell Lowell)
48A Christmas Hymn (Alfred Domett)
49Brightest and Best of the Sons of the Morning (Reginald Heber)
50God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen (Dinah Maria Mulock)

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