A Visit from St. Nicholas my children," Moore claimed the Christmas poem in this 1844 letter as his "literary property, however small the intrinsic value of that property may be." "A Visit from St. Nicholas" appears on pages 124-127 in Moore's volume of collected Poems (New York: Bartlett and Welford, 1844). Before 1844, the poem was included in two 1840 anthologies: attributed to "Clement C. Moore" in Selections from The American Poets, edited by William Cullen Bryant (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1840), pages 285-286; and to "C. C. Moore" in the first volume of The Poets of America, edited by John Keese (New York:
A Visit from St. Nicholas Santa filling the children's Christmas stockings hanging by the fire, and laughs to himself. They share a conspiratorial moment before Santa bounds up the chimney again. As he flies away, Santa wishes everyone a "Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night." The poem's meter is anapestic tetrameter (four feet of unstressed-unstressed-stressed). The anapest is the same foot used to construct limericks, and the common metrical modifications that can be observed in the limerick form also can be observed in Moore's poem. For example, while the first two lines each use full anapests, lines 3 and 4 each