The Tenor Bell

by Alfred Tennyson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

A Sequence of Six Poems

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I. The Edge

They ploughed the Long Acre in the spring,
And sowed it, and the barley grew;
At Martinmas the sea came through,
And left the gatepost and its ring.

The gatepost stands upon the sand
And holds a gate that is not hung,
And by the iron of its tongue
It latches nothing to the land.

The church is next. Its tower is square,
Of cobbles gathered from the shore;
It stood a mile from sea, and more,
When Wainsby first was christened there.

The houses went before the field;
The people live now at the Carr,
And have a church there, new, and far
From the stone font where they were sealed.

The sea is quiet at its trade:
It takes a yard, and then a yard,
And leaves the clay face cut and scarred
As clean as if it used a spade;

And where the face is cut so clean
The parish shows in all its bed:
The roots, a ploughshare rusted red,
And coffin-boards, and bones between.

The Rector writes to men who know;
The men who know come down by train;
They pace the edge, and pace again,
And write a figure down, and go.

The figure is two yards a year;
The tower is twelve yards from the brink;
The Rector does the sum in ink,
And reads it out, and it is clear.

The barley the Long Acre grew
Lies rotting on the sea's grey floor;
The gatepost stands upon the shore
And keeps a field the tide goes through.

II. The Last Peal

sung by the ringers on the Sunday before the bells came down

Tom Ombler on the treble,
Ned Harland on the two,
Joe Medd upon the middle bell,
Sam Fewster, the fourth to you;
And Abel on the tenor,
That is older than all of you.
Ring them round, and ring them down,
And the sea come in when it will.

They come on Monday with blocks and rope
And a wain from Wainsby Carr,
To let them down through the belfry trap
And across the fields, and far;
And the new church there is red and square,
And it stands where the cattle are.
Ring them round, and ring them down,
And the sea come in when it will.

The treble rang when Tom was wed,
The tenor tolled his mother down;
There isn't a child in Wainsby parish
That the bells have not rung round;
And the tenor, Abel, the tenor
Shall ring us all into the ground.
Ring them round, and ring them down,
And the sea come in when it will.

Ring for the Long Acre, ring for the gate,
Ring for the bones in the clay,
Ring for the Rector's figure that says
We have six years to stay;
And ring the tenor last of all,
For the tenor goes last away.
Ring them round, and ring them down,
And the sea come in when it will.

III. Written in Heaven

When the tower fell, the scar was strewn with clay,
And in the clay, with coffin-boards and stone,
Our dead lay open to the light: the bone
Of a hand, a jaw, a child's head, small and grey;
And whose they were, not one of us could say,
For the stones that should have named them had been thrown
Face down beneath the tide, and none was known
Except to God. We carried them away
In fish-boxes, four miles, and dug one grave,
And on one stone one line of letters cut:
OF WAINSBY: WRITTEN IN HEAVEN. What the sea gave
We kept; the rest it kept; and the earth was shut
Over the boxes, and the Rector read
"Our dear brother" over all the dead.

IV. The Engineer

Mr. Laverack, Engineer to the Drainage Commissioners, in the vestry at Wainsby Carr, in April

Sit down, sir. No, I thank you, I will stand.
I have been on that edge a week with the chain,
And standing is a habit in the legs.
Here is the thing you asked for. Take the weight.
That is her tongue: four stone of Swedish iron,
And flattened on two faces, where it struck
Two hundred years, the one side and the other.
We drew it on the Saturday, with the rest,
Because a bell goes on the road tongue-out,
Or else she beats herself to death in the wain.
So that is where it was. And there it is.

You'll want the figure for the Commissioners.
I have it here: fifteen yards since last spring,
Near enough; and laid in with the forty years,
The average comes to two yards and a third.
I gave you two, from the Ordnance and the terrier
And the posts I set along the edge in 'seventy;
Two yards, the tower at twelve, and so six years,
And you read out my letter in the church.
It was a true sum. I would set it again.
An average is a true thing. It is what
The sea has done, laid level, year by year;
It is not what the sea will do on a Wednesday.

The four went on the Monday by the wain;
They hang above us now; you heard them Sunday.
The tenor waited for the timber-carriage
That was to come on Thursday from the town,
And so she lay the Tuesday and the Wednesday
On skids upon the tower floor, chocked, mouth west,
Fourteen hundredweight of bell, and quiet.
On Wednesday night the wind went round at dark
Into the north-east, on the top of a spring tide.
I was in my bed here at the Carr. I heard it
In the chimney, and I said, it will stand the night.
And in the morning fourteen yards were gone:
The west end of the tower, the yew, the wall,
The lych-gate, and the half of the old yard;
And where the tenor lay, sir, there was air.

We looked at the ebb on Thursday and on Friday.
The scar was bare: a stone or two, the yew
Laid on its side with weed already in it,
And all the rest you buried. Not the bell.
I had two cobles out with a grapnel, dragging
A day, and never touched her. She's in the sand,
And will be; for the Commissioners will not pay
To raise her, and I will not ask them to.

Now, Ombler. I have heard what Ombler says,
And I'll not laugh at it, for I like the man.
I stood below the Sunday that they rang
The last peal down, and watched him take her up,
And never saw a heavier thing done lighter.
But hear me, sir. A bell is rung by swinging.
She must hang free, and turn mouth-up, and fall,
And the tongue must swing, and strike her on the bow.
She must be in the air. Lay her in sand,
And fill her mouth with sand, and take her tongue,
And put a fathom of the sea on her,
And she is fourteen hundredweight of metal,
As dumb as any boulder on the scar.
The sea may roll her. It may knock her, even,
Against the scar; and that would be a knock,
Through sand and water. It would not be a note.
I'll put my name to that. I've put my name
To the drain that keeps you dry here, and to that.

And you've a good church, sir. Brick, and dry, and set
On clay that has no business with the water,
Four miles back. The parish has gone back
As a man moves back his chair when the fire's too hot:
It is the same man, and the same fire. It is the chair.
The papers write as if the world ran on rails,
And rails were grooves, and nothing could come off.
I've laid rails. They are not. A wheel stands on them
By its own flange and its own weight, no more,
And it will leave them on any curve you like
If it is driven at it wrong. I say this
Because you told the church the parish goes on;
And so it does, sir. On its weight. That's all.

I went down to the edge on Sunday night.
Not for the bell. To see the lightship's lamp
And judge the set of the tide for the new posts.
It was a still night. There was nothing. Nothing.
The sea came in and went out on the scar
The way it does. I stood there half an hour.

Take back the tongue, sir. Hang it in the porch.
I'd have it seen. It's iron, and it's worn,
And it is here.

V. Abel Ombler

the tenor ringer, who fishes from a coble off the Church Scar

I know what Mr. Laverack said:
A bell must swing to sound, he said,
And she lies on the sand like lead.

They've hung her tongue up at the Carr,
Inside the porch, upon a bar,
For folk to look at. There you are.

I rang her forty year and four.
You learn a bell below the floor,
And not by ear. The hands know more:

The sally rising from your grip,
Her balance at the top, her dip,
Her stroke come down to your finger-tip.

It was a still night, late in Lent;
The tide was slack, the wind was spent;
I had my lines down, and I went

To haul them on the Church Scar ground,
Off where the old yard went, and drowned
The yew, the lych-gate, and the mound.

I hauled hand over hand, and slow,
No lamp, the lightship riding low
Away to the south; and then, you know

The way a line will catch. It caught,
And hung a breath, the line as taut
As she at balance, for a thought.

And then it came. I didn't hear;
I never heard her; but as clear
As down the sally, forty year,

It came along the line to me,
Her stroke, from underneath the sea,
Into my hands, as it used to be.

I cut the line. I let it go,
Hooks, bait and all. I'll not have so
Much as a hook in her. And no,

I'll not tell Mr. Laverack. I
Took marks: the Carr tower standing by
The black mill, and the lightship's eye.

He'd have her up, and hung, and then
She'd ring at the Carr for Wainsby men,
And prove him right. And right again.

But there's the ones that never came
Up in the boxes, with no name
But what's in heaven. She'll lie the same.

On Sundays, at the Carr, I stand
Where her rope would hang, and lift my hand
At her turn. And the four understand.

VI. At the Carr

The church at the Carr is red and new,
And dry, and four miles from the spray;
The bells were hung on Martin's day,
A year from when the sea came through.

They ring the rounds on Sunday: one,
And two, and three, and four; and then
A beat of nothing; and again
The treble, and the round begun.

Nobody bade them ring it so.
It is the hands. The hands have known
Her weight too long to ring alone,
And keep her measure, and are slow.

The engineer has proved her dumb,
And what he proved, he proved it plain;
And Abel, telling it again,
Says up the line her stroke has come.

I keep the two. The proof is sound;
And what came up to Abel's hand
I do not know, nor understand,
And it is not a thing I found.

And in the beat the four leave free
I hear the shape of what is gone,
As if the bell were ringing on
Four miles away, beneath the sea.

It is a silence, and no more:
The length of her, and not her sound;
The four ring on, and come around,
And leave it open, like a door.

The gatepost stands upon the sand
And holds a gate that is not hung;
The tenor lies without her tongue;
And four ring rounds across the land.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ab Alfrēdō Tennysone per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alfred Tennyson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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