Nearly 200 years ago, a man named Arthur Henry Hallam died at the age of 22 of a cerebral hemorrhage. His death profoundly affected his college friend, a man we know as Alfred Lord Tennyson. His grief was deep, and Arthur’s death literally shook the foundations of his world. He journeyed into and through his grief in the way you would expect a poet to do — through writing — ultimately producing what was published in 1850 as In Memorium.
As present-day poet Malcolm Guite describes it, In Memoriam “is a kind of spiritual journal, a series of intimate lyrics taking the poet from the first extremities of grief, through radical doubt that there is any goodness in the world, and finally towards a renewed and profound faith in the God who is Love” (The Word in the Wilderness).
It is raw and wild and wonderful, challenging and inspiring, and in many ways quite true to both the hope of the Christmas season and the spirit of New Year’s. The portion I have quoted below comes at a turning point. As the story goes, Tennyson was staying near Waltham Abbey in Essex when the late night air was suddenly broken by the sound of church bells. In England, it is customary to ring the church bells over midnight on New Year’s Eve to “ring in the New Year” — that’s where that expression comes from.
For Tennyson, their sudden pealing jolted him into a kind of vivid awareness of all that was around him and in him. And so through the imagery of winter’s night and New Year’s hope, Tennyson sets out a powerful and prophetic expression of “our Advent hope in the coming of Christ; not just at Christmas but in and through all time and at the end” (Guite, Waiting on the Word).
So without further ado, the poem:
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.
As Malcolm Guite sums up his reflections on this poem: “We may be tempted to despair, and it is perhaps the easier and certainly the lazier option. But ultimately, the great and life-transforming hope of this passage is not rooted in the immediate success of one scheme of amelioration or another, but in the only place where hope can be rooted: in Christ himself, and his long Advent. It is those who know — that, however faintly the bell in their hand may chime, they are ringing in the Christ that is to be — [they are the ones] who can make the most fruitful and productive changes in the here and now” (Waiting on the Word).
Have hope, my friends.
Happy Christmas, and a very merry New Year.
Pastor Michael
Adapted from 31Dec2023 video homily for FBC Pedricktown.
Please note that the Alfred Lord Tennyson poem included in this post is in the public domain and not subject to copyright.