In the Library
The Night Before Christmas
Clement Clarke Moore, 1823
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 1k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol also makes a winter night into the setting for a visit, but it asks a miser to change his life where the poem asks only that you look at the window.
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Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening also stops a single winter night in a handful of rhymed lines, but it keeps its wonder close to a dark that does not answer.
£1.99
Peter and Wendy
J.M. Barrie
Peter and Wendy also sends a visitor through the window of a sleeping nursery at night, but it tempts the children away, where the poem only wants them to wake up to presents.
£1.99
About the book
"'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse." Say those lines aloud and the rhythm takes over, two light beats and a heavy one, a gallop that canters the poem along like hooves on a roof. A father hears a clatter on the lawn and throws open the shutters, and what he sees there became the shape of the night for the English-speaking world: the miniature sleigh, eight tiny reindeer called by name, the soot on the fur, the belly that shakes like a bowlful of jelly. Before these verses Saint Nicholas had no settled form; after them he was a jolly old elf for good. The poem first appeared without a name, and the argument over who truly wrote it has never closed. Its real gift is a grown man's astonishment at his own window, handed on to every child it is read to in the dark. When the sleigh lifts away and a voice calls back over the rooftops, the sleeping house seems to hear it.