Ring Out Wild Bells!

Tennyson wrote a great little new year's poem titled Ring Out, Wild Bells.  It's a great celebration of the New Year, though it originally seems to have been written as an elegy, and is recited yearly in Sweden for over ten years.  It's been put to music and I for one enjoy the tune.  I can't get to a new year without thinking of Ring Out, Wild bells, and I'm perfectly fine with that.

I feel like the poem creates a certain sense of spaciousness.  Calls "across the snow" to the "wild sky" with bells ringing out brings to our minds visions of vast expanses laid before us.  This is a nice feeling to have toward the new year.  Thinking of the next 365 days as full of promise and possibility, ready for us to go forth and conquer them.

There's also a sense of release.  We're told the year is dying, and to let him die.  The bells are called forth to ring away sorrows, vices, and strifes. I can't quite place when it started, but I've been thinking a lot about the idea of impermanence, the acceptance that things don't last forever.  I think many of us would increase our happiness is we learned to be more comfortable with the idea that nothing lasts forever. We could also really help to strengthen the values and character in our society, understanding that many things are not innate, not just normal, and if we want something to endure we need to take steps to preserve it.

Leaving behind the lesser parts of ourselves and pushing forth toward a tomorrow with a better us in it.  Tennyson's poem inspires to that.  My greatest hope most of the time around the new year is that we maintain our desire to better ourselves and the world around us for than the month or two surrounding the celebration, but even if only for a week a two may this great poem inspire you to

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

And ancient forms of party strife;

Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Happy New Year, everyone!