The Constellated Sounds of Bells

Breslin Tower, Sewanee, Tennessee

Breslin Tower, Sewanee, Tennessee

First Sunday after Christmas

Sewanee, Tennessee, where I spend each Christmas, is a great place for bells and chimes. There is the 56-bell carillon in All Saints’ Chapel—once one of the largest in the world although probably no more—and the single Otey Parish bell. There are also the bells in Breslin Tower, which strike the time every quarter hour.

Sewanee spends much of the winter locked in fog, giving the bells a special mystical quality. One peers through the mists and sees the sandstone gothic bell towers looming tall. This Robert Bridges poem takes me back to these bells.

If the title of the poem indicates when it was written, then Bridges is writing about the last Christmas before all hell broke lose. The following four Christmases would be celebrated in the World War I trenches, and references to chimes will take the form of Wilfred Owen’s savage irony: “What passing bells for these who die like cattle?”

Still, even with foreboding, we must hold on to the angel hope voiced in Bridges’s epigraph: Peace and good will to humankind.

Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913

By Robert Seymour Bridges

Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis

A frosty Christmas Eve 
when the stars were shining
Fared I forth alone 
where westward falls the hill,
And from many a village 
in the water’d valley
Distant music reach’d me 
peals of bells aringing:
The constellated sounds 
ran sprinkling on earth’s floor
As the dark vault above 
with stars was spangled o’er.
Then sped my thoughts to keep 
that first Christmas of all
When the shepherds watching 
by their folds ere the dawn
Heard music in the fields 
and marveling could not tell
Whether it were angels 
or the bright stars singing.

Now blessed be the tow’rs 
that crown England so fair
That stand up strong in prayer 
unto God for our souls
Blessed be their founders 
(said I) an’ our country folk
Who are ringing for Christ 
in the belfries to-night
With arms lifted to clutch 
the rattling ropes that race
Into the dark above 
and the mad romping din.

But to me heard afar 
it was starry music
Angels’ song, comforting 
as the comfort of Christ
When he spake tenderly 
to his sorrowful flock:
The old words came to me 
by the riches of time
Mellow’d and transfigured 
as I stood on the hill
Heark’ning in the aspect 
of th’ eternal silence. 

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.