Note 15 — SELECTED POEMS
Reading edition
On hearing the bells ring on the passage of the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. The resolution was adopted by Congress, January 31, 1865. The ratification by the requisite number of States was announced December 18, 1865. [The suggestion came to the poet as he sat in the Friends’ Meeting-house in Amesbury, where he was present at the regular Fifth-day meeting. All sat in silence, but on his return to his home, he recited a portion of the poem, not yet committed to paper, to his housemates in the garden room. “It wrote itself, or rather sang itself, while the bells rang,” he wrote to Lucy Larcom.]