John’s Notes: Austwick Village Newsletter, January 2021
It is said that the New Year's Eve peal of the twelve bells of Waltham Abbey inspired Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘Ring out, Wild Bells’. He was staying nearby at the time. In some versions of the story it was a particularly stormy New Year's night, and the ‘wild’ bells were being swung by the wind rather than by ringers - a fanciful idea which campanologists think unlikely. It would seem truer to imagine that the storms which roused Tennyson that night were internal. The tumult he felt was within. ‘Ring out, Wild Bells’ forms part of the longer poem ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’, a requiem for the poet's beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who was engaged to Tennyson’s sister Emily, and who had died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged 22.
Many composers have set ‘Ring out, Wild Bells’ to music, including Karl Jenkins who makes it the centrepiece of the finale of ‘The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace’, his resolutely anti-war epic based on the Catholic Mass, commissioned by the Royal Armouries Museum to mark their millennial move to Leeds. Jenkins powerfully conveys Tennyson’s defiant appeal for the darkness of the present time to shrink before the light of a coming better future.
This is the spirit I hoped to capture as I read Tennyson’s poem in church over Christmas. After the crippling year we have had, as a community, as a nation, and as a world, I wanted to help us channel our pain and anger at the plague we’re in and all its brutalising effects, by spitting out the line: “The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.” In face of ‘the party strife’ - the social and political upheavals which beleaguer us, the suffering many and the profiteering few - it feels right to voice our loud appeal to “Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times.” And, engendered by the great goodwill generated in this crisis, is the longing to move forward in hope: “Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good.” (‘The common love of good’ puts me in mind of one MP’s appraisal of the food poverty campaigning footballer Marcus Rashford, “He has the sort of principles and moral values that most people hold.”)
The story we hear at Christmas - of ordinary Mary, Joseph, the innkeeper and the shepherds, the wise explorers responding audaciously to the extraordinary circumstances they found themselves in - resonates to every ordinary person in this world who has each had to respond, on an almost daily basis, to our extraordinary situation this year. The mourning, storm-crossed Tennyson, inspired by the exuberant message of the gospel story, found faith to believe in the ultimate triumph of “The larger heart, the kindlier hand”, in the ringing out of “the darkness of the land”, and the ringing in of “the Christ that is to be”.
It’s extraordinary that the simple birth of a child in Bethlehem brings so much hope to a struggling world. In the defiant spirit of Tennyson, Jenkins, the gospel writers and everyone who has ever raged against the darkness, may we look forward to better times ahead, and play our part in ringing in these changes.
In Memoriam (Ring out, wild bells) - 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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