What a gush of euphony voluminously wells! To the turtle - dove that listens, while she gloats What a world of happiness their harmony foretells! To the tintinnabulation that so musically wellsįrom the jingling and the tinkling of the bells. What a world of merriment their melody foretells! Would have had to have had a dramatic effect on Poe.

YouĬould not hear the bells of University Church there now - the din of theīronx is too great, and since the Church was only built in 1845, its bells Still be visited a few blocks from Fordham, on the Grand Concourse. But there is something atmospheric about the lines, like the sound effects beloved of filmmakers, where the night is still save for the ghostly whistle of the wind through the trees and the sonorous far-off chiming of a church bell.Poe lived in the Bronx for number of years, and his house can Perhaps the speaker of this poem is another condemned man, like the criminal who is doomed to hang in ‘Eight O’Clock’, although the bells are not ringing for his execution (they are ringing ‘the hollow night amid’, after all): this bell doesn’t toll for thee.

And bells ringing in Housman poems rarely betoken something good: they are less likely to be wedding bells celebrating a happy marriage than the sound of the bell gathering its strength to strike the hour of a man’s execution (see Housman’s poem ‘Eight O’Clock’) or the noisy church bells calling to church a lad who has recently lost his lover (‘Bredon Hill’). Why does the tintinnabulation of bells recall to his mind (and his tongue) all of the things (bad things, if they leave a sour taste) he ever did?Ĭhristopher Ricks suggested that there is a pun on ‘tongue’ in the poem: bells have tongues as well as speakers of poems. And yet perhaps the real reason why the poem is so haunting is that we don’t know why the sound of the bells ringing in the tower should generate such a response from the speaker. Sounds, rhymes and half-rhymes, jostling (sorry, justling) against each other in discordant cacophony. And it is partly the delicate effects of this four-line quatrain that make it so memorable: ‘justle’, ‘taste’, ‘tongue’, ‘sour’, those ‘s’ and ‘t’ sounds and that flat ‘u’ of ‘justle’ and ‘tongue’.

The tintinnabulation of the bells poem