A Peal of Bells by Christina Georgina Rossetti
A speaker calls for bells, wine, flowers, and music to shut out thought and pain during fleeting summer hours. As a dead friend is carried feet first, the speaker calls for solemn bells, rejects the music, and sees the feast darkened by grief and awareness of their own mortality.
By Christina Georgina Rossetti · Genre: Lyric Poetry, Elegiac Poetry · 298 words
First lines
Strike the bells wantonly, / Tinkle tinkle well; / Bring me wine, bring me flowers, / Ring the silver bell. / All my lamps burn scented oil, / Hung on laden orange-trees, / Whose shadowed foliage is the foil / To golden lamps and oranges. / Heap my golden plates with fruit, / Golden fruit, fresh-plucked and ripe; / Strike the bells and breathe the pipe; / Shut out showers from summer hours; / Silence that complaining lute; / Shut out thinking, shut out pain, / From hours that cannot come again.
Genres
- Lyric Poetry — Two rhymed stanzas convey a speaker's shift from demands for pleasure to grief at a friend's death.
- Elegiac Poetry — The second stanza mourns a dead friend, replacing festive music with solemn bells and reflecting on the speaker's own mortality.
Tags
bells · feasting · mourning · death · music · mortality
What this Textopian page supports
A Peal of Bells is listed on Textopian as a poem by Christina Georgina Rossetti, dated Date unknown.
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- Work type: Poem
- Author: Christina Georgina Rossetti
- Date: Date unknown
- Language: English
- Genres: Lyric Poetry, Elegiac Poetry
- Length: 298 words
- Structure: 1 section, 2 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)
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