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Title: The Belfry Old
Author: J. C. Manning [
More Titles by Manning]
On a New Year's Eve, by a belfry old,
With a sea of solemn graves around,
While the grim grey tower of the village church
Kept silent ward o'er each grassy mound,
With a cloak of ivy about it grown,
Fringed round, like fur, with a snowy fray;
On a New Year's Eve I watched alone
The life of the last year ebbing away.
Anon there came from the belfry out
A strange wild sound as of pleasure and pain;
For the birth of the new a jubilant shout:
For the death of the old a sad refrain.
And the voice went throbbingly through the air,
Went sobbing and sighing, with laughter blent;
All the echoes awakening everywhere;
A guest that was welcomed wherever, it went.
I thought, as the sound of each babbling bell
Came gushing away from the belfry old,
That stories such as the dying tell
Were up in that belfry being told:
As the words men mutter in life's last fear
Seem to shrink from Eternity back to Time,
So it seemed to me that each echo clear
Came back from the grave with a lesson sublime.
"Yet another year!" it seemed to say;
Gone one more year in the battle of life;
With its yearnings in gloom for the coming day,
Its pantings for peace 'mid the daily strife;
Clay lips that kissed but a year ago
With the fervent warmth of life and love;
Dear eyes that gladdened bright homes below
In one short year with the stars above.
Gone one more year, with its masses that prayed
For the daily bread that so seldom came;
With its lives whom sinning could never degrade,
Till the canker of want brought guilt and shame.
Gone one more year, with its noble souls
Who raised up the weary in hours of need;
With its crowds that started for wished-for goals,
And drooped by the way, broken-hearted indeed.
Gone one more year, with its wearisome woes;
Its pleasures hoped for--never seen:
Its swallow-winged friends: its fair-faced foes:
Its sorrow which happiness might have been:
Its cant and its cunning: its craft and crime:
Its loves and its hates: its hopes and fears:
Its lives that, reaching tow'rds heights sublime,
Fell short of the mark in a sea of tears.
Gone one more year, to tell all the rest
How wise the old world had gotten of late:
How fools still flourish, by wealth caressed:
How the noble of mind meet a pauper's fate;
How the infidel heart, accursed, defies
All hopes of Heaven--all fears of hell:
How the saintly preach from the book of lies,
And scoff at the truths which Saviours tell.
How the pious who poison the poor man's food
In shoddy and shop grow golden and grand:
How the rent-roll harbours the stolen rood--
The emblazoned escutcheon the bloody hand:
How women and men to the altar hie,
And swear to the promise they rarely keep;
How Vice, a shameless and living lie,
Gets honours which Virtue never can reap.
Gone one more year: there is no return.
Press onward, still onward, for weal or woe.
Beat heart: throb brain: hot eyelids burn:
Man's troubles and trials who cares to know?
Birth, marriage, and death: death, marriage, and birth,
Are the treadmill steps of this wheel of strife;
Cloak, draught, and a crust--then a hole in the earth:
And the struggle for these is the story of life.
So sang the bells in the belfry old,
Or so it seemed to me they sang;
And the year died out as the moments rolled,
Still o'er its bier the joy-bells rang:
'Twas mourning an instant, merriment then,
And the ghastly shroud where the old year lay--
How like is the humour of bells and men--
Became swaddling-clothes for the New Year's Day.
[The end]
J. C. Manning's poem: Belfry Old
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