Today’s Poem: Ring Out, Wild Bells

Ring out the darkness of the land

Evgenij Ivanovic Stolica, The Ruination of Church Bells, 1924 (Meisterdrucke)

In Memoriam 106 (“Ring out, wild bells”)

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
   For those that here we see no more;
   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
   And ancient forms of party strife;
   Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
   The faithless coldness of the times;
   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
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It was 1850 when Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) published In Memoriam A.H.H., an elegy for his college friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, who had died 17 years before, at the age of 22. Or perhaps “elegy” is the wrong word for a poem with 2,916 lines in 133 sections — a vast canvas on which Tennyson sought to convey his grief at the loss of his friend and found himself reaching for the spirit of the age along with expressions of his own humanism and religious sense, in a mixture of optimism about human truth and pessimism about human error.

Part of the reason In Memoriam could encompass so much is its form, written in iambic tetrameter quatrains with the rhyme scheme that Tennyson made his own (still called the “In Memoriam stanza,” which runs abba, the two middle lines rhymed with each other, and the first line with the last). The form proved so flexible that Tennyson could engage both his particular grief and general philosophical topics with it.

In truth, with In Memoriam he was free to range through any thought that came to mind — but all of it framed by one incontrovertible fact: We live in a universe of death, and we continue to live even when those we love die.

Tennyson, c. 1850 (Wikimedia Commons)

The form was even flexible enough to include a New Year’s lyric in Section 106. That section, Today’s Poem, is part of Tennyson’s reaching, in his concluding sections, toward consolation for his grief over his lost friend, as he seeks in the passage of time a gain to match the loss. “Ring out, wild bells” imagines that the New Year will abolish evil, disease, war — a picture of time that every New Year might be imagined to offer, for a moment. The poem is a wild call for an impossible future that pious hope must nonetheless demand: “Ring in the Christ that is to be.”

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