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The sections
listed above depict the speaker’s spiritual evolution from loss of faith
and despair to hope and a renewed faith by tracing the speaker’s
experience of personal grief over the three Christmas holidays
following the death of his friend.
In Section 28, recounting the first Christmas holiday, the speaker
feels despair over the loss of Hallam, tinged with nostalgia for a
happy past. The speaker claims
that when the bells of his village church woke him on this Christmas day he
“woke with pain, / I almost wished no more to wake, / And that my hold on
life would break/ Before I heard those bells again” (lines 13-16). But while he feels despair, the sound of
the Christmas bells bring back joyous memories from past Christmases. The bells, therefore, bring order to his “troubled
spirit” : “They bring me sorrow touched with joy, The merry, merry bells of
Yule” (lines 19-20).
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Section 78
recounts the second Christmas following Hallam’s death. The speaker notes that on this holiday his
grief has a calmer expression.
Family and friends participate in the traditional Christmas games
again, this time without a “single tear” or “mark of pain.” The speaker is initially distressed by this
apparent lack of feeling. Wondering if
sorrow can “wane” and “grief be changed to less,” the speaker regrets that
“regret can die,” feeling as if he has betrayed his friend in letting his
grief lessen (lines 13-16). But in the
final lines, the speaker realizes that his grief has not lessened, but has
grown calmer with time: “Her [sorrow’s] deep relations are the same, / But
with long use her tears are dry” (lines 19-20).
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Sections 104-106
recount the third Christmas following Hallam’s death. At this holiday, the speaker experiences a
renewal of hope expressed through his reaction to the Christmas
bells. The speaker’s family are
celebrating Christmas this year in a new home. And while the new location makes the
speaker feel like a stranger and seems to violate the family’s old Christian
traditions, the speaker seems ready to let go of old forms and traditions
that no longer have meaning and make way for new life. He addresses the Christmas bells in Section
106: “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” (lines 5-9). The speaker seems willing at last to let
go of his grief and make way for a new understanding: “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” (lines 29-32). In these lines Tennyson transforms the
troubling concept of evolution that caused such a crisis in Victorian faith
into a form of spiritual evolution.
All things change, but out of change can come progress. The speaker argues that our understanding
of the Christian religion may change, but it can evolve into a new and better
understanding, “the Christ that is to be.”
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