Ring Out, Wild Bells...

A Facebook friend today posted the following extract of a poem, saying that for him it:

"strikes the perfect tone for the dying of one year, and the birth of another. 

We know, if we've lost someone in our lives, how that loss has many qualities that continue to unfold for the rest of our lives. 

These qualities seem to travel on parallel paths, often intersecting, to keep life rich with complexity that is equally often difficult to fathom...we press on.

We celebrate that our breath still feeds us through all struggle, and of course when the ease of it is similarly astonishing, we are breathing then as well, though perhaps those breaths are not drawn so deeply, or somehow the lightness of them belies the depths they plumb..." 

 Excerpted From: 

In Memoriam A. H. H., by Alfred Lord Tennyson

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.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out thy mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

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.

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.