A New Day, Year, Decade

(A long-exposure photo using sparklers in Manila.  ROMEO GACAD/AFP/Getty Images)

On this first day of a new year, a new decade, it feels right to start big. Alfred, Lord Tennyson spent 17 years writing his masterful “In Memorium A.A.H.,” a one hundred and thirty three (yes, 133) canto poem that started off as an elegy written in sadness after the sudden death of young Arthur Henry Hallam, his sister’s fiancée, but is truly more a grand missive on life and death and, to me, reveals more about Tennyson’s own philosophy and sensibilities than anything else. In fact, Tennyson himself probably knew he was taking on so much more when he wrote the words of the original title: “The Way of the Soul.”

Since this work is divided into parts, each of them can stand on their own, individual poems in their own right. My favorite part, “Ring Out, Wild Bells,” is also most appropriate for today, the welcoming of a new year. The act of embracing the new means shedding the past, leaving things behind to make room for the unknown. Here Tennyson doesn’t just celebrate time to come, but has a wider vision for embracing the better parts of ourselves as people, as societies and a world. Let’s join him in ringing in “the nobler modes of life.”

Wishing a happy 2010 to all and ringing in of that which is good and a tolling out of all that is not.

Ring Out, Wild Bells

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.

(Clean-up in Times Square early this morning.  Gives true meaning to "out with the old.")