Today’s Poem: The Bells of Hell
O Death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?
The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling
by Anonymous
The Bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling For you but not for me. For me the angels sing-a-ling-a-ling, They’ve got the goods for me. O Death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling? O Grave, thy victory? The Bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling For you but not for me.
The First World War may have been the most literary war an English-speaking people has ever fought. A handful of poets survived the war: Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), Robert Graves (1895–1985). But many did not: Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918), Edward Thomas (1878–1917), the Americans Alan Seeger (1888–1916) and Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918). And part of the reason their poetry seems so moving is our knowledge of their impending deaths and their gifts only starting to blossom.
Not all the verse of the time, however, was grim and foreboding. Well, yes, nearly all the verse of the time was grim and foreboding. It’s just that some of it was done in the key of black comedy. A popular soldier’s song — often ascribed to British airmen — is just as certain of death and judgment, but “The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling” treats the Four Last Things with gallows humor. The song is still sometimes recorded, often in the altered version Brendan Behan put in his 1958 play The Hostage (released as a skiffle single by Dominic Behan in 1959).
As for its origin, it may have elements of a comic pre-war song that the singer Harriet Vernon (1858–1923) would perform (according to W.G. Fay in his 1935 memoir The Fays of the Abbey Theatre): “She only answered Ting-a-ling-a-ling / To all that I could say.” A curious item in an August 1911 edition of The Mixer and Server (a union newsletter from the Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ International Alliance and the Bartenders’ International League of America) ascribes to “New York Press” a notice of the Salvation Army in London singing, “The bells of hell go ding-aling-ling / For you, but not for me.” There’s little other evidence for this already slightly parodic song, but 1911 was enough before the World War I parody that the notice’s sheer existence suggests the song’s reality.
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The “The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling” is in a straightforward ballad meter, quatrains of four-foot lines alternating with three-foot lines, rhymed abcb, and for one of our lighter Wednesday offerings, it’s hard to beat the gallows humor of the riff on 1 Corinthians 15:55: “O Death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling? / O Grave, thy victory?”
Thank you for the two works by Sargent, he has been a favorite for decades. They were both new to me.
“The Bells of Hell” is just one of many popular songs and well-known anecdotes and commentaries from the Great War era which were used to tie together the bitter satire of the musical play “Oh What A Lovely War!” I believe there was a film of the play, but there is nothing quite like seeing it on stage to convey the sense of futility and waste and jingoism that underlaid the drive to make war among the nations of early 20th century Europe. It was the “M*A*S*H” of its era (only rather less sanctimonious). Highly recommended.