Ring Out the Old, Ring in the New

I am writing to you from the home of my parents in Sewanee, Tennessee, where I figure I have spent around 48 of my 58 Christmases.   In this I differ from the Tennyson in the third Christmas passage of In Memoriam.  For the first time since Hallam’s death, he is not celebrating the season in the ancestral home.

The break with the past also signals a new determination to break with mourning—or at least break with the isolation connected with mourning. “Ring out the grief that saps the mind,/For those that here we see no more,” he writes and then, a few stanzas later,

I will not shut me from my kind,
And, lest I stiffen into stone,
I will not eat my heart alone,
Nor feed with sighs a passing wind . . .

I understand well the danger of stiffening into a stone and of eating the heart alone.  In past posts I have talked about Beowulf’s dragon as a symbol of this danger.  And while I am heartened by Tennyson’s resolve to engage again with the world and turn the burden of Hallam’s death into a gift, I sense a problem as well.

I am speaking out of my own experience.  A year after Justin’s death, St. Mary’s College bestowed on me the college’s top honor, the Norton Dodge Award for Service, Scholarship, and Teaching.  (The three categories rotate and it was for Service that year.)  The award may, out of sympathy, have been bestowed prematurely—usually it comes later in one’s career—but I still found it meaningful.  The problem was, I felt I now had to go out and prove myself worthy of the award.  To quote from Steven Speilberg’s Saving Private Ryan, it was as though Tom Hanks had looked into my eyes and said, “Earn it.”

In the following years, I overcommitted to service: I became department chair, I became editor of a monthly college publication, I continued to run three film series and a book discussion group, I served on two or three committees a year, and I taught my courses without cutting back in my demands upon students and accepted anyone who wanted to write his or her senior project under my supervision.  I also taught Sunday School. By the end of that year I came close to having a mental breakdown.

It’s not that Tennyson hasn’t made progress.  It’s just that mourning is a complex progress and can’t be put aside just because one has decided that it’s time.  Listen closely and see if you can figure out if Tennyson is entirely grounded as he talks of moving on. As with the first two Christmas passages, this one starts with bells, only these bells are unfamiliar ones:

The time draws near the birth of Christ;
The moon is hid, the night is still;
A single church below the hill
Is pealing, folded in the mist.

A single peal of bells below,
That wakens at this hour of rest
A single murmur in the breast,
That these are not the bells I know.

Like strangers’ voices here they sound,
In lands where not a memory strays,
Nor landmark breathes of other days,
But all is new unhallow’d ground. 

It’s good, I think, that Tennyson is venturing into new ground, unfamiliar and unhallowed though it may be.  It may even be good (though I have doubts) to leave the traditional Christmas celebrations behind:

To-night ungather’d let us leave
This laurel, let this holly stand:
We live within the stranger’s land,
And strangely falls our Christmas-eve.

 Our father’s dust is left alone
And silent under other snows:
There in due time the woodbine blows,
The violet comes, but we are gone.

No more shall wayward grief abuse
The genial hour with mask and mime;
For change of place, like growth of time,
Has broke the bond of dying use.

Let cares that petty shadows cast,
By which our lives are chiefly proved,
A little spare the night I loved,
And hold it solemn to the past.

But let no footstep beat the floor,
Nor bowl of wassail mantle warm;
For who would keep an ancient form
Thro’ which the spirit breathes no more?

Be neither song, nor game, nor feast;
Nor harp be touch’d, nor flute be blown;
No dance, no motion, save alone
What lightens in the lucid east

Of rising worlds by yonder wood.
Long sleeps the summer in the seed;
Run out your measured arcs, and lead
The closing cycle rich in good. 

I’m a little confused here.  It sounds good that he’s stepping away from his father’s dust and letting nature, the woodbine and violet, take over.  That sounds like he’s invoking nature’s power to heal.  It sounds good that he will no more let “wayward grief abuse” the Christmas season.  It sounds like he is looking to a new sun in the “lucid east” and to rising new worlds.  They have been asleep but now that cycle has come to a close and a new cycle is upon us.  I’m all for Tennyson stepping out of his pain and into the future.

But does he really need to abandon the Christmas rituals in the process? Why no more bowl of wassail or song or game or feast or harp or flute or dance or motion? It’s good that he’s addressing the cares that define our lives, telling them to give us a break on this day. But why spare just a little “the night I loved” (i.e., Christmas Eve).  Why so subdued? Does he fear that he has been using Christmas as an emotional crutch?

Thus it is with mixed feelings that I read what comes next.  On the one hand, charging the bells to ring out is inspirational.  Tennyson seems to be telling himself to step out of his isolation and make a significant contribution to the world (and he in fact would go on to become the spokesperson of the age, the quintessential Victorian poet).  But I worry that the charges are a little forced. I worry that his new resolve does not grow out of a grounded acceptance of Hallam’s death but rather represents frantic compensation.  But you judge:

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.

This is powerful dreaming and I want to be a part of it.  The “civic slander and spite” especially hits home as I listen to the hysterical (measured would be okay) attacks in Congress against the universal health care bill.  We have millions of people who are without coverage, and if the Christmas bells can ring out “foul disease” and ring in a larger heart and a kindlier hand, then sign me up.  By all means, ring in a thousand years of peace.

But I am concerned about Tennyson’s mental state as well, and I’m not surprised when the poem suddenly shifts in tone, perhaps from manic to depressive.  Suddenly he’s talking about windy blasts, icy daggers, and bristling thorns.  “It is the day when he was born” refers, I assume, to Christ, but it could be Hallam as well.  If so, what does he mean that “the time admits not flowers or leaves to deck the banquet.”  This is precisely the time we need flowers and leaves:

It is the day when he was born,
A bitter day that early sank
Behind a purple-frosty bank
Of vapour, leaving night forlorn.

The time admits not flowers or leaves
To deck the banquet. Fiercely flies
The blast of North and East, and ice
Makes daggers at the sharpen’d eaves,

And bristles all the brakes and thorns
To yon hard crescent, as she hangs
Above the wood which grides and clangs
Its leafless ribs and iron horns

Together, in the drifts that pass
To darken on the rolling brine
That breaks the coast.

Then, however, Christmas makes a comeback.  This last line continues:

                                But fetch the wine,
Arrange the board and brim the glass;

Bring in great logs and let them lie,
To make a solid core of heat;
Be cheerful-minded, talk and treat
Of all things ev’n as he were by;

 We keep the day. With festal cheer,
With books and music, surely we
Will drink to him, whate’er he be,
And sing the songs he loved to hear.

Tennyson seems to be in the grip of powerful mood swings, and I love the poem for capturing them.  Here he’s up again.  Yes, celebrate Christmas with books and music, a fire in the hearth, cheerful-minded talk, and the songs that Hallam loved to hear.

Mourning does not progress in a straight line.  We move inside ourselves and then we get sick of ourselves. We reject things from the past and then we return to them and discover their healing powers.  I don’t know if Tennyson entirely works out everything into a coherent system and I don’t really care.  Poetry can be philosophical but it’s not philosophy.  What I know is that the poet gives me images that help me articulate and sort through my own confusion.  While I don’t entirely understand what comes next in the poem, there are lines there that give me strength: 

I will not shut me from my kind,
And, lest I stiffen into stone,
I will not eat my heart alone,
Nor feed with sighs a passing wind:

What profit lies in barren faith,
And vacant yearning, tho’ with might
To scale the heaven’s highest height,
Or dive below the wells of Death?

What find I in the highest place,
But mine own phantom chanting hymns?
And on the depths of death there swims
The reflex of a human face.

I’ll rather take what fruit may be
Of sorrow under human skies:
’Tis held that sorrow makes us wise,
Whatever wisdom sleep with thee.

I hear Tennyson saying here that we find more to sustain us in other people than in our own solitary laments, barren faith, and vacant learning.  Such abstractions stiffen us into stone.  Better to remain in the realm of the human, even if it doles out sorrowful fruit.  And Tennyson is right: such sorrow can make us wise.  As his poem demonstrates.

I know the past four posts have not been the most cheerful.  My discussion of A Bridge to Terabithia got me thinking of Justin—this is the tenth Christmas since his death—which in turn led me to think about Tennyson and Hallam.  I know that I have been terribly earnest.  To be sure, I’m not wrong about Christmas being a season of death as well as of life, of darkness as well as of light.  But Christmas is magical because of how life and light blaze up so unexpectedly and miraculously that they cause us to forget the dark.  It’s time for me to stop being quite so solemn and to surrender to joy.  Ring it in!