Ring out the old

Last week I was listening to American online radio when, during a station break, a woman read out a poem: “Ring out old shapes of foul disease, Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.”

I thought it was a poem appropriate for our times and wondered who had written it.

These days you can look up the title of a musical piece using an app like Sound Hound. You use the app to “listen” to a few seconds of the music — any genre and, increasingly, pieces from all over the world including the Philippines — and, wonder of 21st-century wonders, it gives you the title and performer of the piece.

Alas, as far as I know, there isn’t a similar app for poems and texts, but then there’s an old-fashioned Google or Yahoo search.  You just have to remember a line or two of the text, type it in, and you’re bound to get several results to lead you to the original piece.

Published in 1850

With this particular poem, there was a familiar cadence and style that made me suspect it was an old poem — and true enough, it was Alfred Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” perhaps more popularly known as  “Ring out, wild bells” and first published in 1850. One of his biographers, Adam Charles Roberts, calls the poem a masterpiece that occupied Tennyson some 17 years before he felt it was ready to be published.

The poem has since been translated to many languages, nearly all European, and made into religious hymns to be sung toward the end of the year.

Its popularity, in the West at least, captures the yearend spirit, when we want to think that we can ring away the difficulties of the past 12 months and ring in a better year.

What struck me, though, was that all of the past year’s trials in the mid-19th century could very well be the ones we endured in 2017, and with much more pain and suffering. There was a scourge of diseases (including, for Filipinos, the ongoing debacle with the dengue vaccine), the lust of and for gold, and much more.

The power of Tennyson’s poem comes in the breadth of the “old” that he wants to ring out, including something very private: “Ring out the grief that saps the mind,” meant specifically for the grief we have for loved ones who have died. The biographer Roberts writes that Tennyson’s poem was, in fact, spurred by the loss of one of his closest friends and that it, in turn, provided comfort to Queen Victoria when she was widowed.

The warning about grief is important because the yearend does tend to remind us of recent deaths among family and friends. At the same time, Tennyson might very well alert us to a growing plague of our times.  As a university administrator, I can tell you our young ones today seem so much more vulnerable to being consumed by their anxieties and grief.

Tennyson does talk more about what we call today “macro” issues: “Ring out the want” reads one line, and in another, “Ring out the feud of rich and poor.” We have to remember that the poet was writing during what the historian Eric Hobsbawm called “the age of revolution,” marked by class struggles and the fall of monarchies and aristocracies.  Just two years before Tennyson’s poem came out, a young man named Karl Marx had published a political pamphlet with an ominous start: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre.”  The tract went on to describe the inevitable class struggles and revolutions.

Yearning for peace

There’s a yearning for peace, but we have to remember that there are wars and there are wars: nations against nations, governments against their own peoples. We have to learn to be sensitive to doublespeak: A war on drugs is still a war on people, and the casualties add up.  I was myself shocked to read the latest figures from the Philippine National Police (reported in an Inquirer report the other day: “Palace: Drug war to improve in 2018”).  During the period of July 1, 2016, to the present, the PNP reports, 3,967 were killed in antidrug operations… and 16,355 deaths are “under investigation.”

“Ring out the false and ring in the true” reads another line in Tennyson’s poem, and still another: “Ring out the civic slander and the spite.”  He would be shocked to see the extent today of fake news, alternative facts and cyberbullying.

How I wish we could indeed just use bells to ring out the old year and all its tribulations.  Since September UP Diliman’s Carillon has been playing more nationalistic songs, with the pacifist “Blowin’ in the Wind” thrown into the playlist, as an act of solidarity with the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines’ call to protest extrajudicial killings. (Actually, we started playing “Bayan Ko” regularly as early as November 2016, in connection with a fake hero’s burial.)

But it will take more than bells to ring out the evils of the world. Tennyson makes a good point about the need for “nobler modes of life” and “sweeter manners, purer laws” and, reflecting his own Christian humanist convictions, appeals:  “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.”  Never has the world seen so many refugees being turned away from national borders, or maltreated, even killed, when they do cross to what they thought were safe havens.

Speaking up

The ringing of bells is, of course, a metaphor. More powerful than the bells are human voices.  We need to speak up, speak out.  Tennyson does not mention what could well be the greatest danger that lurks in our hearts: despair.  It is too easy to give up, and to go about our own business.  Or, when we do speak up, to simply say there is no room for hope given how populist politics has taken over.

We forget that populist leaders rise to power precisely by dangling false promises and fueling those false hopes with fake news.  The past year, we have also seen that populist politicians will sometimes respond to protests and drops in opinion ratings not so much because of democratic instincts as of bruised egos.

Times do change, in terms of the sheer numbers of those who suffer. Dec. 28, Innocents’ Day, needs to be better commemorated in terms of the modern-day massacres of our young.

Ring out the old in our hearts and in our minds, facing up to the new challenges of our times both with courage and compassion.

Since I’m in La Union, let me wish you the best for 2018 in Ilokano: Naragsak a baro nga tawen!

mtan@inquirer.com.ph