If ever there was a year we wanted to say goodbye to, it is this one. This poem is part of Tennyson’s long elegy, In Memoriam A H H. It was inspired by the death of his close friend, Arthur Hallam, in 1833 at the age of twenty-two, which led Tennyson to question his Christian faith. He thought it through for many years, before the poem was published in 1850.
The Ring Out, Wild Bells section comes near the end, where, after confronting his doubts, Tennyson has found his faith again. The bells of the local church are ringing in the New Year. We don’t have to be practising Christians to respond to the poem’s powerful and moving message of renewal, and hopes for better times to come.
Tennyson did not actually invent the unusual stanza form, but it has come to be so closely identified with his use of it in this long poem, that it is known as the “In Memoriam” stanza. As so often with Tennyson, if you read it aloud, it sounds like music. No other poet does that so well, in my opinion.
Ring Out, Wild Bells
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.
The Good Reader 