Ring Out Wild Bells (In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 106)

Summary


"Ring Out Wild Bells" is a New Year poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson that uses the tolling of bells as a driving refrain to mark the passage of one year into the next. With each stanza, the speaker urges the bells to drive out grief, social injustice, war, greed, and falsehood, while ringing in truth, peace, and human dignity. The tension between what the world is and what it could become gives the poem its emotional force and sense of urgent, restless longing.

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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.

A church bell ringing against a frosty winter night sky, illustrating Ring Out Wild Bells by Tennyson.

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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Credits

Alfred Lord Tennyson was a Victorian English poet who served as Poet Laureate of Great Britain for over forty years. This poem forms section 106 of his elegiac masterwork *In Memoriam A.H.H.*, written over seventeen years following the sudden death of his closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, in 1833. The New Year setting gave Tennyson a frame to channel personal mourning into a sweeping vision of social and spiritual renewal.