Poem of the Day: ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’

Even about the name there is controversy. The title on its orginal 1823 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 scholars in recent decades snarling that anyone with half a brain could see that the actual author is Henry Livingston, or that anyone with the sense of a rabbit knows the author is Clement Clarke Moore, to whom the originally anonymous poem was long ascribed.

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. Written in comic anapests, the tetrameter lines romp through 28 rhymed couplets, 56 lines, 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!”