Anyone who has dragged their feet back to school after a holiday will recognise the joke in Thomas Hood's "Christmas Holidays": the same road, the same number of boys, and two completely different journeys. Hood is remembered chiefly for comic verse and wordplay, and here he fits a whole comedy into fourteen lines. The poem shows departure and return and says nothing of the holiday between them. The six weeks of freedom vanish in a clause ("Six weeks elapse"), which is perhaps how holidays feel anyway.
The central idea is that happiness shows most clearly in what happens when it ends. Hood never tells us the boys dread school. He only shows how they sound. On the way out they are "six small boys" who "declare their joys / With trumping horns and juvenile huzzas," glad to be "changing learning's pains for pleasure's toys." That last phrase is a neat antithesis: learning is pain, play is pleasure, and the line swaps one for the other like goods at a counter. On the way back they are "dull and mum," and the poem leaves us to feel the difference.
The form helps. This is a sonnet, and its first eight lines rhyme ABBAABBA, as in the Italian pattern. The turn arrives where that pattern expects it, at line nine, with "Six weeks elapse." The sestet rhymes CDCDEE and ends in a couplet, a habit more common in English sonnets. That closing pair gives Hood his punchline. The rhymes also carry meaning. The octave's A-rhymes ("noise," "boys," "joys," "toys") all share one bright, rowdy vowel, so the verse itself seems to be shouting. The metre is iambic pentameter, and the regular beat suits the rattle of wheels. Hood also bends it. "Struggles along, drawn by a pair of bays" opens with a stress on the first syllable, so the line lurches like the chaise. In "A heavy coach drags six more heavy souls," the repeated "heavy" and the dragging verb make the line plod.
The poem moves from sound to silence. It opens on "a noise" and ends on "Dumb." Everything in the octave is audible: wheels, horns, huzzas. The sestet answers with negatives: "no glad urchins shout, no trumpets bray." Even the bell changes character. It "tolls," a word with a funeral ring, and a gate-bell that tolls rather than rings makes school sound like a sentence being passed. This is an inference from the word choice, but the pattern around it supports it.
Hood also plays with how the boys are named. They begin as "small boys," become "glad urchins," then "little boys," and finally "heavy souls." That last phrase is almost comically grand, as if the weight of term had settled on their spirits. The vehicles change too, from the "neat post-chaise" to a "heavy coach." The first trip has names (Mr. Rounding, Reverend Mr. Crow), as if reported with fussy local precision. The return has no names at all, only anonymous bodies in a carriage. The formal phrasing of "ever and anon" and "juvenile huzzas" makes the boys' noise sound like a minor public event, which is gently funny.
The last line is the sharpest. The boys are as silent "as six new scholars to the Deaf and Dumb." Today we would not use those words, but the comparison is clear enough. These boys are as speechless as pupils arriving at a school where nobody speaks. The repeated "six" (six boys, six weeks, six souls, six scholars) tempts us to imagine the same boys, changed into strangers. The rhyme of "mum" with "Dumb" shuts the poem like a door, with two words for silence landing together.
The poem is slight, but that is part of its charm. Sonnets are often saved for love, death or grand ideas, and Hood uses one to catch a small, universal truth about childhood. He does it with a joke, a few sharp sounds, and a sudden quiet.