Poe’s autumnal “Bells”

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Illustration Edmund Dulac, 1912
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells” (1848) is another example of a poem that must be recited and heard recited aloud and, for that reason, this blogpost includes an audio of my reciting the poem at the bottom of the post. “The Bells” is a composition of sound; it is onomatopoeic—about sound, it imitates sounds and plays with sound to evoke sound, and to evoke emotions evoked by sounds. Like other Poe poems, it relies on the sound effects of words—things like rhyme and alliteration—and on meter, the rhythm of the words when strung together, to create a very musical composition.

Poe was inspired by the sound he heard coming from Fordham University's bell tower in the Fordham Manor neighborhood of the Bronx, New York, where Poe lived the last few years of his life (he had also written a poem about the Angelus bells). Poe adopted the thesis that the bells are metaphor for life, and a thematic construct that divided his poem into four sections. These may be easily interpreted as four seasons—winter, spring, summer and fall—but may also be read as four lifetime “epochs;” childhood, youth, middle age and old age:
  • First, Poe presents sledge bells, made of “silver,” which express the “merriment” of a winter scene; their sound is described as “jingling” and “tinkling;”
  • Second, we hear “wedding bells,” made of gold, which express the “happiness” of a couple entering into wedded bliss; they represent “delight,” and their sound is described as “rhyming” and “chiming;” 
  • Third, we have fire alarm bells, made of brass, which express the “terror” of a conflagration; they convey “affright,” and their sound is a “clamor” and a “clangor;”
  • Fourth and finally, we have funeral bells, made of “iron,” expressing the “solemn thought” proper to a cemetery; they, too, express “affright”—their sound is “moaning” and “groaning.”
Poe, however, does not present the four types of bells and the emotions they evoke as equal qualities. The first inkling we have of their inequality is the relative length of each section. The winter wonderland of the breezy first section runs a mere 14 lines. The “wedding bells” section gets a little longer, stretching to 21 lines. The “frantic fire” of the third section burns even longer, running to 34 lines. Then, the “melancholy menace” of the funeral bells creeps over 44 lines, the longest of the sections. Taken together, the first two sections focusing on light/life run 35 lines, which is less than even the third section taken by itself.  Together, the third and fourth section, focusing on darkness/death, run for 78 lines (twice as long as the light sections) and dominate the poem.

It is not the length of the stanzas alone, however, that establish the disparity between the four sections. The poem is structured as a descending spiral of sinking despair, with each successive stanza representing a large, palpable intensification of the sequence. The first two sections are all third person narrations. By the third stanza, we encounter some abstract personifications (“the started ear of night;” later, a disembodied “ear” that “fully knows” and “distinctly tells”).  By the fourth stanza, however, we are inserted into the scene with some peppering of first person plural narration (“In the silence of the night/How we shiver with affright”) and a whole little drama unfolds, with the Elf King dancing as his minions toll the funeral bell, as Poe kicks the repetitive beat into high gear and whips the meter into a frenzied finale.

If “The Bells” represent the seasons, then the poem is a melancholy dirge about Fall, and the “muffled monotone” of a world closing down for winter. Even though it is a metaphor for death, the final stage, the frenetic pace of the rhythm of the repetitive ‘outro’ groove typical of Poe foreshadows the merriment of the winter that is to come, as the cycle of the seasons begins all over again.

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