Ring out, wild bells

Steady readers know I usually post on Thursday nights, unless something quite significant prevents either actual typing or useful inspiration. Not last night. I was not about to give 2020 any more dignity than it deserved.

New Year’s Eve usually affords a writer copious opportunities for mildly nostalgic, rosy-tinted year-end review. What jolly times we had singing songs and toasting marshmallows around the… um… well, to use a phrase not my own, the dumpster fire. (Note that the Brit. English term is ‘skip,’ which doesn’t sound nearly ugly enough.)

As a world, we lost lives on an unimaginable scale. Our wilderness places alternately melted and burned ferociously out of control. Leaders of countries close to my heart behaved like half-wits, unable to marshal the leadership skills of a Cub Scout. Furthermore, all too many proved equally incapable of mature decision-making and honest empathy. (This was as true of their political behavior as their efforts to help their people during a raging pandemic.)

Perhaps hardest to watch at the time, and remember now, is the slow drifting out to sea of our elders. They were confined for their own health and safety, but as a result, unbearably far away from our voices, our hands, our laughter and tears. The ebbing of their zest for life has broken many more hearts than mine.

In short, a horrible year, unworthy of any kind words delivered in hindsight. A miserable year, creeping out of the calendar’s pages in rain, fog, snow. (Well, not in Australia perhaps, where Sydney persists in delivering end-of-year fireworks that throw shade on just about everywhere else on the globe.)

Hark, ’tis Tennyson at yon break of dawn!

I don’t ordinarily carry poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, around in my mental filing cabinet. But there is one poem that rather sticks with me. It is In Memoriam, also known by its first line “Ring out, wild bells.”

Last December, I heard it read live in London’s St Martin in the Fields, part of a candlelight concert that included Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and “Winter” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The reader’s name slips my mind, and the files are in too much upheaval for me to find the program, but his voice was resonant and deep. (He rather reminded me of the late, lamented Alan Rickman.) It didn’t hurt that I was seated almost directly underneath the pine-and-holly bedecked pulpit.

By curious coincidence, you can also read it in a New Year’s e-greeting card drawn by the delightful British artist, Jacquie Lawson. And read it again I did, as I sent some greetings of the season flitting around the world’s time zones as midnight approached.

It’s pretty fierce stuff. For a Victorian, I mean. And the application to the year just past could not be more relevant. Consider:

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…

I mean, really. “Those here no more… party strife”?

It goes on:

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…

“Civic slander and the spite” seems tailor-made for the last twelve-month, doesn’t it?

You can read the whole thing on Poets.org. I honestly can’t see anything out of the ordinary in British life in 1850, the year Tennyson became poet laureate and composed the poem, that should have gotten him all excitable. I suppose there’s no accounting for poetic inspiration.

Nonetheless, I think it is singularly apt for the kicking the arse-end of 2020 to the curb. Where I, for one, plan to place it in the nearest dumpster, match and gasoline in hand.

Banner photo by Designecologist from Pexels