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.
