Ring Out, Wild Bells by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Quick answer: Ring Out, Wild Bells by Tennyson analysed: the New Year section of In Memoriam, its ring out and ring in structure, and craft lessons for modern poets.
Every New Year's Eve, somewhere in the world, someone reads this poem aloud as the bells strike, which is exactly the use Tennyson built it for. Ring Out, Wild Bells is section 106 of In Memoriam A.H.H., the long elegy he assembled over seventeen years of grieving his friend Arthur Hallam, who died suddenly at twenty-two. Within that vast poem of doubt and slow recovery, this lyric is the moment grief turns its face deliberately toward the future.
The design is audible from the first line: everything old, false, and grieving is to be rung out; everything truthful, kind, and just is to be rung in. Eight quatrains, one repeated verb pair, and a list of what a broken man wants the new year to remove and deliver. Its machinery is simple, its reach is not, and both are worth study.
The poem
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 'In Memoriam A.H.H.', section 106 (1850)
What the poem says
The opening stanza sets the scene with rare economy: wild bells ring across snow and flying cloud; the year is dying in the night, and the bells must ring it out and let it die. The word wild matters, these are bells swung to their limits, and the dying year is granted a deathbed, which in an elegy is no idle figure.
Then the anaphora begins its work, and the poem becomes a litany of exchanges. Ring out the old, ring in the new; ring out the false, ring in the true. The second stanza makes the elegiac core explicit: ring out the grief that saps the mind, for those that here we see no more, Hallam, unnamed, present in every line. From there the poem widens ring by ring, from the private to the civic to the global: out with the feud of rich and poor, in with redress to all mankind; out with a slowly dying cause and ancient forms of party strife, in with nobler modes of life, with sweeter manners, purer laws.
The late stanzas grow more ambitious still: out with want, care, sin, and the faithless coldness of the times; out with false pride, civic slander, and the spite; out, in the most quoted stanza, with the thousand wars of old, in with the thousand years of peace. The final quatrain gathers everything into a figure of the future: ring in the valiant man and free, the larger heart, the kindlier hand; ring out the darkness of the land, ring in the Christ that is to be. The poem ends not with arrival but with summons; everything it wants remains on order.
How it works
The stanza is the famous In Memoriam quatrain: iambic tetrameter rhymed ABBA. That envelope rhyme gives every stanza a closed, rocking shape, the outer rhymes folding over the inner pair, and across the whole elegy it produces a sound of thought circling on itself. In this section the effect is put to new use: each stanza swings out and returns like a bell's arc, and the enclosed rhyme becomes the mechanics of ringing.
The dominant device is anaphora, ring out and ring in repeated through every stanza, and the lesson is in how Tennyson keeps a single formula alive for thirty-two lines. He varies the ratio, some stanzas all expulsion, some balanced exchange; he varies the scale, mind, street, nation, millennium; and he escalates the abstraction, from grief to feuds to darkness itself. A list poem survives on the intelligence of its ordering, and this one is ordered as widening circles.
One more decision repays attention: the poem asks the bells to do everything. The speaker never claims he will ring out his own grief; he delegates renewal to the bells, to the turning year, to whatever the future is bringing. Grammatically the whole poem is imperative, addressed to bells, and that displacement is psychologically exact: this is what hope sounds like when a mourner cannot yet produce it himself and must ask the noise of the world to carry it.
Why it lasts
The poem lasts, first, through use. It is recited at New Year gatherings from Britain to Sweden, where a translation has been declaimed publicly at midnight since the 1890s, and its phrases surface in sermons and speeches every January. Poems with a fixed date in the calendar are re-activated annually, and this one owns midnight on the thirty-first.
It lasts on merit too. Because it is a wish list rather than a report, it has never come true and never dated: the feud of rich and poor, civic slander and spite, the thousand wars, every generation finds its own news in the list. And within In Memoriam it carries structural weight, the hinge where an elegy consents to the future. Queen Victoria said the whole poem comforted her after Prince Albert's death; readers in grief still find that this section names the exact moment recovery becomes an act of will.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the paired imperative. Build a poem on two repeated commands, out with and in with, leave and arrive, take and give, and let every stanza perform one exchange. The form forces you to name both what you reject and what you want, which is harder and more honest than complaint alone.
Steal the widening circles as well: order your list from the private wound outward to the public world, so the poem earns its biggest claims by climbing to them. And note the calendar trick. Tying a poem to a recurring moment, a new year, a first frost, a birthday, gives it a life beyond the page, because occasions call poems back. A poem built for an occasion, tested before an audience or a contest deadline, learns quickly whether its refrain can bear repetition.
What poets can take from this
- Build a litany on paired commands so every stanza names a rejection and a wish.
- Order list poems in widening circles, from private grief to public world.
- Use envelope rhyme (ABBA) when you want stanzas that swing out and return.
- Delegate hope to an outside force when your speaker cannot yet claim it.
- Anchor a poem to a recurring date and it will be recalled every year.
Try it yourself
Write a poem for a turning point in the calendar, built entirely on two repeated imperatives of your own choosing, moving stanza by stanza from one private loss out to the widest public wish you can honestly make.
Questions
What is Ring Out, Wild Bells about?
It is a New Year lyric from Tennyson's elegy In Memoriam, asking the midnight bells to ring out grief, falsehood, feuds, and war, and ring in truth, kindness, peace, and a better humanity. Written in mourning for Arthur Hallam, it marks the elegy's turn from grief toward hope.
Is Ring Out, Wild Bells part of a longer poem?
Yes. It is section 106 of In Memoriam A.H.H., published in 1850, a sequence of over a hundred linked lyrics mourning Tennyson's friend Arthur Henry Hallam. The section is often printed and recited on its own at New Year.
What form is Ring Out, Wild Bells written in?
Eight quatrains of iambic tetrameter rhymed ABBA, the so-called In Memoriam stanza. The enclosing rhyme gives each stanza a swinging, bell-like return, and the repeated commands ring out and ring in structure the whole poem.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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