The Church-Bell
As I was lying in my bed
I heard the church-bell ring;
Before one solemn word was said
A bird began to sing.
I heard a dog begin to bark
And a bold crowing cock;
The bell, between the cold and dark,
Tolled. It was five o’clock.
The church-bell tolled, and the bird sang,
A clear true voice he had;
The cock crew, and the church-bell rang,
I knew it had gone mad.
A hand reached down from the dark skies,
It took the bell-rope thong,
The bell cried “Look! Lift up your eyes!”
The clapper shook to song.
The iron clapper laughed aloud,
Like clashing wind and wave;
The bell cried out “Be strong and proud!”
Then, with a shout, “Be brave!”
The rumbling of the market-carts,
The pounding of men’s feet
Were drowned in song; “Lift up your hearts!”
The song was loud and sweet.
Slow and slow the great bell swung,
It hung in the steeple mute;
And people tore its living tongue
Out by the very root.
Elinor Wylie published her first full poetry collection, Nets to Catch the Wind, in 1921, establishing a distinctive voice in early 20th-century American poetry. Wylie’s work still sounds new-minted, thanks to her skill in giving traditional verse forms contemporary subjects, concise diction and, above all, sharp, sensuous imagery. The Church-Bell, one of the poems included in the collection, marks in several ways a departure from her characteristic style. While a concise piece of storytelling, ballad-like in form, it lacks the poet’s typically original and sensuous word-choice. The style is straightforward and declarative, the focus on action rather than image. The Church-Bell seems to build a narrative out of symbols, and ask to be interpreted finally as a poem of ideas.
The soundscape Wylie assembles in the opening quatrains proclaims antagonism. The church-bell is announcing the start of an unusually early-morning service. But, before the response of “a solemn word” – from the preacher, presumably – a bird begins to sing, and soon a cock and a dog add their voices to the competition. Lying in bed, the listening narrator imagines the disruption in terms of sound only: she doesn’t take us inside the church.
There’s an ominously placed line-break between the third and fourth lines of the second verse: “tolled” takes the emphasis, and is repeated in the first line of verse three. The bell seems solidly installed “between the cold and dark”. But something changes. The narrator comments on the quality of the bird’s song (“a clear true voice he had”) and perhaps it’s envy that prompts the bell’s response. We’re not told how its pitch or pace are altered – only that the narrator “knew it” (the bell) “had gone mad”.
The poem becomes increasingly gothic, and symbolic, as it goes on. It seems that the mysterious “hand” which has reached out of the sky to seize “the bell-rope thong” gives the bell new authority and zest – gives it speech, in fact. Its first command seems to be a general one to the people, to “lift up” their eyes. “The clapper shook to song” suggests it both sings and resounds with the singing of others. What seems to happen in verses four to six is that the bell demands more than song, a greater vision and unity. The unity may initially be with the natural order, with “wind and wave”. But the shouted command, “Be brave!” might be heard as encouragement to revolution or war. The newly empowered bell might represent a form of dictatorship.
Wylie takes a rather different view of ecclesiastical imagery in Sunset on the Spire, an interesting comparison with The Church-Bell. Here, the transcendence is benign: “From the sun’s dome / I am shouted proof / that this is my home, / And that is my roof.” Without the demanding bell, merely a sunlit spire, the speaker is at home on earth.
In The Church-Bell, that compressed last verse brings about the end of any assimilation between the human and transcendental. In the ballad’s brief dawn timeline, humans take over the new day with a new soundscape of market-carts and hurrying feet. The bell’s movement decreases: “Slow and slow the great bell swung.” After it has ceased to move or sing, a mob (“people”) tears out its tongue in apparent revenge. The violence done to the bell is primitive and shocking but Wylie resists proclaiming its defeat as either victory or travesty.
Could Victor Hugo’s novel, Notre-Dame de Paris, be a possible source for the poem? Set in Paris in 1482, the novel was published in 1831. Wylie could easily have read it: she may even have watched early silent screenings of the movie based on the novel, its later versions famous as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Wylie’s all-important sound effects would seem more at home in medieval Paris than in a contemporary town or city. There is no motley cast, of course, no churchmen, no Quasimodo, no Esmeralda. Still, the ballad might at least in part be Wylie’s imaginative, highly filtered “translation” of the Hugo novel, presenting the clash between church law and human instinct through a non-human protagonist embodying the conflict in symbolic form – the church-bell.
