A Christmas Song

Summary


"A Christmas Song" by William Cox Bennett is a brief, wind-swept poem in which a speaker pleads with the winter wind to carry a message home to a sailor at sea. Through biting hail, sleet, and snow, the wind becomes a messenger of love and longing, its shrill moans transformed into a call urging the sailor homeward before Christmas arrives. The poem captures the ache of separation and the fragile hope that nature itself might bridge the distance between two people.

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Blow, wind, blow.
Sing through yard and shroud;
Pipe it shrilly and loud,
Aloft as well as below;
Sing in my sailor’s ear
The song I sing to you,
“Come home, my sailor true,
For Christmas that comes so near.”

A young woman calls to the winter wind at a stormy coastline, longing for her sailor's return, in A Christmas Song.

Go, wind, go.
Hurry his home-bound sail,
Through gusts that are edged with hail,
Through winter, and sleet, and snow;
Sing in my sailor’s ear,
Your shrilling and moans shall be,
For he knows they sing him to me
And Christmas that comes so near.

Credits

William Cox Bennett was a 19th-century English poet known for his lyrical verse and songs celebrating everyday emotion and patriotism. "A Christmas Song" reflects his gift for weaving natural imagery — wind, hail, and winter storms — into expressions of intimate human longing.