The Full Text of “Five Bells”
The Full Text of “Five Bells”
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“Five Bells” Introduction
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"Five Bells" is Australian poet Kenneth Slessor's autobiographical reflection on grief, time, and memory. The poem's speaker can hardly believe that his friend Joe (who drowned in Sydney Harbor) is really dead and gone. Joe remains alive in the speaker's memory yet painfully out of reach, beyond the border that divides life from death. Grief, this poem suggests, leaves mourners in a strange limbo, unable to reach the dead they remember so clearly. Slessor first published this poem in his 1939 collection Five Bells: XX Poems.
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“Five Bells” Summary
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The speaker declares that the kind of time you can measure with clocks isn't the kind of time he experiences: his kind of time is like a motionless sea. Between the ringing of the bells that mark the passage of time on the warship he sees in the water below him, he's been able to live through many lives in his imagination. In particular, he's relived his friend Joe's life. Joe has been dead for some time, and he now only lives between the five-bell alarms that mark the hours on a ship.
The speaker looks out to the sea, where long, wavering streaks of moonlight hit the water. He hears five mechanical bells ringing to mark the hour on a ship. The night sky and the water become one big dark slash; Sydney Harbor seems to be floating in the sky, and the Southern Cross (an important constellation) reflects in the ocean.
Why, the speaker wonders, is he thinking of his dead friend Joe? Why is he dislodging all these random thoughts of Joe's life from the past, where they belong? Joe is gone, so long-gone, in fact, that his name is meaningless. But something of Joe still endures, like a ghost trying to speak, banging on the doors of the physical world, bashing them to make the speaker hear his anger.
The speaker asks Joe if he's yelling at him, trying to push up against the silent windows that separate life from death. He tells Joe to keep on yelling, to rattle the windows and shout his name.
But no, the speaker can't hear anything. All he can hear is the bells stupidly marking the mathematical time. The ghostly Joe's cries don't make it through to him; life has put him out like a candle. No dead voice can make its way across the little passage that separates the living and the dead. The only thing that can make it through is the speaker's memory of Joe's bones, buried deep in the mud at the bottom of the Harbor.
The speaker's memories of all the little things Joe once did, or what he thinks he remembers, also make it through. But Joe has forgotten all those things now; Joe (being dead) has forgotten everything. The speaker is left alone to remember how Joe looked, what he said, how he drank up the dregs of his beer; to remember Joe's old coat with its missing buttons, his bony chin and his alert eyes, and his angry rants about the great kings of Ireland and the treachery of the English, and of the even-worse treachery of pub owners. Joe used to complain to the heavens from where he sat in Darlinghurst (a neighborhood of Sydney).
Five bells ring out.
Then, the speaker remembered the stormy night when he and Joe made their way to Moorebank (another Sydney neighborhood) in thick darkness. It was so dark that Joe was completely invisible; all the speaker could perceive of him was a thin voice (just like the voice he'd hear now, if he could break the windowpane that separates the living and the dead). He could hear Joe's voice beside him in the countryside, gasping for breath or blown away by the wind, talking about the poet John Milton, the taste of melons, Tom Paine's philosophy, flute music, and ladies of different lands: Joe explained that he'd found girls from Tahiti to be brown-skinned and angry and girls from Sydney to be white-skinned and angry.
But the speaker could barely hear what Joe was saying, so his stories about Milton and melons and girls were all jumbled together. It was as if fifty different people were speaking, and as if every tree were bending an ear to the voices, or to some creeping creature hiding in the grass. Then, stark as a madman's thoughts, lightning exploded in the sky, creating sharp, dangerous snapshots of the landscape. Not too many people, the speaker says, are so poor and desperate that they have to travel five miles through the wilderness on a night like that—but when Joe did, those were the things he thought about.
Five bells ring out.
By the time he and Joe got to Melbourne, the speaker recalls, Joe has lost his appetite and wasn't so angry anymore. The rain and squashy damp had made Joe's sharp mind softer and slower, teaching Joe—who had always been so fiery-tempered—the gentle, moist pleasures of calm and good behavior. Now, the speaker remembers what Joe wrote in his journal—just one of the many useless things Joe left behind after he died, another sign that a living person was gone now. He'd written: "I have a little six-foot-by-eight-foot room at the top of a tower in Labassa. It's cold and dark up here in winter. I've managed to fit 500 books of all descriptions in here, strewn on the floor and windowsills and chairs. I've got some guns, and some photos and souvenirs of the peculiar things I've seen..."
In Sydney, the speaker remembers, he and Joe argued about the end of the world in a pink-wallpapered room lit by faint, watery gaslight. Even then, he thinks, Joe was moving closer and closer toward death. He often talked about people from his past—especially his father, who went blind, and who played the fiddle. He was once a stonecutter for a graveyard; he made monuments and tombstones with hopeful religious messages. These monuments now rest atop thousands of skeletons—skeletons astonished to find they're dead; they'd never really expected to find themselves holding up these elaborate, cake-like stones.
The speaker asks Joe where he went. The ocean's waters, the speaker says, flow over Joe just like time, mystery, and memory do; memory is a motionless sea. Joe doesn't have a cemetery neighborhood like the dead who lie rotting in their private graves. Instead, the tides and waves roll over Joe's body, their shadows falling down over him like long hair. But those shadows are water. The oceanside flowers that grow like lilies between Joe's teeth are really just seaweed. Joe is no longer anything but an idea. The speaker remembers feeling what Joe must have felt the night he drowned: feeling the water drive its thumbs into Joe's body, feeling Joe's eardrums breaking, feeling the brief pain of death and the long dream that came afterward. He imagines the timeless nothingness of death. But he couldn't follow Joe down; he couldn't see Joe, and he couldn't hold his hand. He wonders: if he could only work out the meaning of Joe's life, why he lived and why he died, would he then maybe be able to hear Joe's voice again?
The speaker looks out his window at the patterns of light on the waves, which dive like fish onto the sand under the broad wash of the moonlight. He looks at faraway ships, and the flashing buoys in the Harbor seeming to pass one ball of fire between each other. He tries to hear Joe's voice, but all he can hear is a boat whistle, the calls of seabirds, and five cold bells.
Five bells ring out.
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“Five Bells” Themes
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Death and Grief
In “Five Bells,” a speaker remembers his long-drowned friend, Joe, as vividly as if he’d seen him yesterday, noting details from his “coat with buttons off” to his “gaunt chin.” But he also feels as if Joe were separated from him by an impassable “strait” (a narrow channel of water). The dead, the poem suggests, feel both painfully near and painfully out of reach: death makes Joe more vivid in the speaker’s mind even as it separates these two friends forever.
The speaker feels that his friend Joe is still with him years after Joe drowned. Even the “unimportant things” Joe used to do feel vivid and memorable: the speaker remembers nights he and Joe spent chit-chatting, a long and dangerous journey the two of them made in a storm through “talons of rain,” and simple things like the way Joe looked when he used to tell his “raging tales.” The smallest of details stay clear and present, even taking on special importance now that Joe is gone.
Because the speaker’s memories of Joe are crystal clear, he feels Joe’s absence all the more painfully. In one sense, he feels as if Joe is right there, banging on the other side of separating “ports” (that is, doors) or the “speechless panes” of windows. At the same time, he knows that neither he nor Joe can beat those doors down; he’ll never hear Joe’s voice breaking through. No one can cross the “strait” that separates the living and the dead.
Grief, the poem thus suggests, means being agonizingly and perplexingly separated from someone who in some sense still feels alive. The great pain of mourning a friend is that it seems impossible they should be gone; they’re still present in one’s memory, just out of reach. Perhaps death even makes a person more vivid in some ways, loading every little memory with significance.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-129
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Time vs. Memory
"Five Bells" is at once an elegy for the speaker's dead friend, Joe, and a meditation on how the passage of time works differently when it comes to memories. The poem's speaker reflects that ordinary clock time, counted out by ticking gears, is “not my time,” not the kind of time he lives through. In mourning his friend Joe, the speaker experiences time differently; it’s as if, through his memories of his friend, he can travel outside the bounds of clock time and into a time when Joe was still alive. Memory, the poem suggests, can often feel deeper and more real than the present moment, carrying people away into the past or allowing them to relive “many lives” in a flash.
The speaker feels this especially keenly as he thinks back on Joe’s life, which now only exists in memory. Joe, he reflects, “lives between five bells,” in the spaces between the chimes that measure out the hours on a ship. His life is no longer taking place in ordinary time (which always ticks steadily forward at the same rate), but rather in the timelessness of the remembered past. The speaker can fit every memory he has of Joe into the time it takes those five bells to ring.
In fact, the speaker is so carried away by his memories that he spends the bulk of the poem living more in the past than the present, revisiting old memories of how he and Joe used to drink, argue, and travel together. The repeated refrain, “five bells,” reminds readers that almost no clock time is going by in the present moment: the same boat is marking the same half-hour all through the poem, even as the speaker relives “many lives.”
For that reason, the “bumpkin calculus” (that is, the crude math) of a ticking clock can’t accurately measure the years the speaker revisits. Both by compressing “many lives” into a few seconds and by leaping effortlessly into the past, the speaker’s memory overpowers ordinary clock time.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-129
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Meaning and Meaninglessness
After the speaker’s friend Joe drowns in Sydney Harbor, the speaker finds himself facing terrible questions. Coming to terms with his friend’s arbitrary and accidental death, he feels as if “find[ing] an answer” to his questions about why Joe lived at all is the only way he might have a chance of “hear[ing Joe’s] voice” ever again. In other words, Joe’s senseless death makes the speaker fear he’s living in a meaningless world—and worry that he can only recover a belief in an afterlife or a purposeful universe if he can scrape together some sense of meaning. Ultimately, the poem suggests that the speaker’s huge questions might be unresolvable.
When the speaker asks the dead Joe, “Where have you gone?” only one part of the answer is clear to him. Joe’s body is certainly lying at the bottom of Sydney Harbor; the “tide is over [him].” But the Joe the speaker remembers is now “only part of an Idea.” The notion that the person Joe was has become nothing more than a memory strikes the speaker as almost absurd. He feels he needs to “find / [Joe’s] meaning,” to understand why it was that Joe lived at all if he was only going to die in an accident as a young man. That is, the speaker feels that he needs answers from the universe (or perhaps God) about why what happened, happened.
If the speaker received such an answer, he thinks, he just might “hear [Joe’s] voice” again: he might be able to believe that he and Joe could meet or communicate again, perhaps in an afterlife. Struggle though he might, however, he can’t “find [the] answer” he’s looking for. Nothing on earth can explain why Joe lived and died, or identify “what purpose gave [Joe] breath / Or seized it back.” The speaker can only hypothesize that such an answer, if it existed, “might” allow him to believe that he and Joe will meet again.
Dealing with tragedy, the poem thus suggests, can force people to grapple with the idea that life might not have a meaning, a purpose, or a design. Mourning can make people long for meaning and doubt its existence at exactly the same time.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 98-108
- Lines 115-118
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Five Bells”
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Lines 1-7
Time that is ...
... between five bells.This poem begins with a reflection on two kinds of time: time as the clock measures it, and time as the speaker experiences it. Clock time, "moved by little fidget wheels" (fussy little gears), is "not my time," the speaker firmly declares. Rather, he's in a kind of time he describes as "the flood that does not flow," a metaphor that suggests a supernaturally still ocean. ("Flood" here means "sea," not "overflowing water.") Unlike clock time, this kind of time doesn't "flow," doesn't move relentlessly forward at a steady rate; unlike clock time, this kind of time isn't "little," but vast as the sea.
In this unmoving "flood," the speaker says, he can live "many lives" in the space "between the double and the single bell / Of a ship's hour"—in other words, in the half-hour interval that marks out a watch (a period of work) on a ship. That image occurs to him as he looks out at a "dark warship" down "below" him in the water of what readers will discover is Sydney Harbor. As this ship's bells ring out, he seems to be in a pensive mood, lost in this mysterious kind of infinite-but-motionless time.
In particular, he's living out "one life" over again, and it isn't his own. It's the life of "Joe, long dead." Readers who are familiar with Kenneth Slessor's life story will know that this "Joe" is a real person: Joe Lynch, a friend of Slessor's who accidentally drowned in Sydney Harbor. No wonder, then, that the speaker is brooding over Joe's life as he looks out over the waters.
This poem will become an elegy for Joe, written in dignified blank verse—lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter. (That means that its lines are built from five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "Between | the dou- | ble and | the sin- | gle bell.")
Joe, the speaker goes on, now "lives between five bells"—a line that suggests that Joe's "life" only goes on in the kind of time that clocks can't measure. He's not even in the half-hour interlude between "a round of bells," but in the space between each individual chime that makes up "five bells," the signal that marks either 6:30 p.m., 10:30 p.m., or 2:30 a.m.
Joe, in other words, only lives on in memory, which isn't bound by the rules of clock time.
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Lines 8-12
Deep and dissolving ...
... upside-down in water. -
Lines 13-19
Why do I ...
... its fury heard. -
Lines 20-26
Are you shouting ...
... the pygmy strait— -
Lines 27-37
Nothing except the ...
... Five bells. -
Lines 38-49
Then I saw ...
... so you'd found. -
Lines 50-62
But all I ...
... Five bells. -
Lines 63-69
In Melbourne, your ...
... ecstasies of rectitude. -
Lines 70-82
I thought of ...
... that I obtained..." -
Lines 83-97
In Sydney, by ...
... and sculptured stone. -
Lines 98-108
Where have you ...
... of an Idea. -
Lines 109-114
I felt the ...
... feel your hand. -
Lines 115-118
If I could ...
... hear your voice? -
Lines 119-129
I looked out ...
... Five bells.
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“Five Bells” Symbols
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The Ringing Bells
The ship's bells that ring out all across the poem symbolize both time and mortality. Used to mark out the clock time, this bell reminds the speaker that, through the power of his memory, he can live "many lives" in a few seconds: the kind of steady, forward-moving time this bell records is "not [his] time."
In another sense, though, there's no escaping the bell's kind of time. Every time those bells ring, the speaker is a little closer to joining Joe in the land of the dead. Here, the poem is drawing on old, old symbolism. Because of their association with both time and churches (where bells might be rung to mark a funeral), bells are traditional images of death.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 3-7: “Between the double and the single bell / Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells / From the dark warship riding there below, / I have lived many lives, and this one life / Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.”
- Lines 9-10: “Five bells / Coldly rung out in a machine's voice.”
- Lines 23-24: “only bells, / Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time.”
- Line 37: “Five bells.”
- Line 62: “Five bells.”
- Lines 127-128: “bells, / Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.”
- Line 129: “Five bells.”
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“Five Bells” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Apostrophe
Much of this poem takes the form of an apostrophe to the speaker's dead friend, Joe. By speaking directly to someone who can't answer, the speaker suggests the almost surreal frustration and confusion of grief.
Joe remains a vivid presence in the speaker's memory. The speaker recalls how Joe used to rant and rave about "Irish kings," "English perfidy," and the "dirtier perfidy of publicans": the English might have been treacherous, Joe felt, but there was no one more treacherous than a pub owner refusing you one last drink. Joe's rowdy, funny character comes through in the speaker's memories of his "coat with buttons off" and his "gaunt chin and pricked eye," too. This was clearly an alert, intelligent man with a good sense of humor—and a person who didn't bother too much with little details like whether or not his coat buttoned shut.
With this detailed portrait in his memory, it's no wonder that the speaker feels he should be able to address Joe directly. But whenever he calls out to that long-lost "you," he's frustrated to find that there's no answer—only the persistent question of whether Joe's spirit is still out there somewhere. He even starts goading that imagined spirit into speaking louder:
Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face
In agonies of speech on speechless panes?
Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!Joe, of course, never answers. By presenting this elegy as a conversation with someone who can't reply, the poem suggests that there's something absurd about death: how, the speaker seems to wonder, can he picture everything Joe said and did so clearly, but not be able to reach him?
Where apostrophe appears in the poem:- Lines 13-16: “Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve / These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought / Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth, / Gone even from the meaning of a name;”
- Lines 20-22: “Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face / In agonies of speech on speechless panes? / Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!”
- Line 25: “Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life,”
- Lines 29-31: “And unimportant things you might have done, / Or once I thought you did; but you forgot. / And all have now forgotten”
- Lines 33-36: “Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales / Of Irish kings and English perfidy, / And dirtier perfidy of publicans / Groaning to God from Darlinghurst.”
- Lines 40-49: “The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark, / So dark you bore no body, had no face, / But a sheer voice that rattled out of air / (As now you'd cry if I could break the glass), / A voice that spoke beside me in the bush, / Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind, / Of Milton, melons, and the Rights of Man, / And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls / Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls / Are white and angry-tongued, or so you'd found.”
- Lines 58-61: “There's not so many with so poor a purse / Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that, / Five miles in darkness on a country track, / But when you do, that's what you think.”
- Lines 63-74: “In Melbourne, your appetite had gone, / Your angers too; they had been leeched away / By the soft archery of summer rains / And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp / That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind, / And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage, / The sodden ecstasies of rectitude. / I thought of what you'd written in faint ink, / Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind / With other things you left, all without use, / All without meaning now, except a sign / That someone had been living who now was dead:”
- Lines 86-87: “But you were living backward, so each night / You crept a moment closer to the breast,”
- Lines 98-108: “Where have you gone? The tide is over you, / The turn of midnight water's over you, / As Time is over you, and mystery, / And memory, the flood that does not flow. / You have no suburb, like those easier dead / In private berths of dissolution laid— / The tide goes over, the waves ride over you / And let their shadows down like shining hair, / But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend / Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed; / And you are only part of an Idea.”
- Lines 110-111: “The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack, / And the short agony, the longer dream,”
- Lines 114-118: “But I was blind, and could not feel your hand. / If I could find an answer, could only find / Your meaning, or could say why you were here / Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath / Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?”
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Imagery
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Metaphor
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Parallelism
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Repetition
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"Five Bells" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Fidget wheels
- Flood
- The Cross
- Profitless lodgings
- Flukes of thought
- Bawl
- Bumpkin
- Dowsed
- Pygmy strait
- Slops
- Your gaunt chin and pricked eye
- Perfidy
- Publicans
- Slab-dark
- Naphtha-flash
- Leeched
- The sodden ecstasies of rectitude
- "Photoes of many differant things"
- Curioes
- The spent aquarium-flare / Of penny gaslight
- Graveyard mason
- Private berths of dissolution
- Sea-pinks
- Thumb-balls
- Quills
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “Time that is moved by little fidget wheels”)
In other words, the tiny gears that run a clock.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Five Bells”
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Form
"Five Bells" is an elegy, a lament for the speaker's dead friend Joe. It's written in 12 irregular stanzas of stately blank verse (unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter), interrupted by an occasional short line of what could almost be stage directions, indicators that "Five bells" have rung out.
Blank verse has a long pedigree; readers might recognize this rhythm from Shakespeare or Milton. Choosing this form, Slessor gives Joe's accidental drowning dignity and gravity. As the speaker desperately tries to find some kind of meaning in his friend's death, this traditional form gently reminds readers that mourners have struggled with this same dilemma for centuries.
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Meter
"Five Bells" is written in blank verse—unrhymed iambic pentameter. That means that each of its lines uses five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 18:
And hits | and cries | against | the ports | of space,
Plenty of poems written in iambic pentameter vary this pulsing rhythm to create a more conversational tone—or, on the other hand, to create drama. Slessor uses such a variation in the very first lines. Listen to the difference in lines 1 and 2:
Time that | is moved | by lit- | tle fid- | get wheels
Is not | my Time, | the flood | that does | not flow.The poem begins with a trochee, the opposite foot of an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm. That means that the poem's important first word—"Time"—hits hard. That first trochee also disrupts the steady meter just as the speaker's memories slice against the mechanical tick-tock of clock time.
In line 2, there's (arguably) a spondee on the second foot, or two stressed beats in a row: "my Time." This second disruption calls attention the poem's idea that there are different kinds of time, and the speaker is experiencing something different from regular clock time here.
Variations like this appear throughout the poem, adding interest, intensity, and emphasis to important moments.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Five Bells" is written in blank verse and thus doesn't use a rhyme scheme. Besides making this poem part of a grand tradition of blank verse poetry, the lack of rhyme here fits with the speaker's grief-stricken reflections on his lost friend. A rhyme scheme might feel a little too neat and orderly in a poem about the way that memory works against the steady march of clock time.
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“Five Bells” Speaker
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The speaker is a representation of Kenneth Slessor himself. This poem is an elegy for Slessor's real-life friend, a man named Joe Lynch whom Slessor got to know when the two worked as journalists. At the height of the Roaring '20s, the two became drinking buddies and stalwart companions. The speaker's tales of Joe's fiddle-playing stonemason father and Joe's drunken rages against the perfidious English are all true.
Joe accidentally drowned in Sydney Harbor in 1927. As this pained, autobiographical poem suggests, the waste and arbitrariness of Joe's death left the grieving Slessor struggling with unanswerable questions about whether life had any meaning at all.
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“Five Bells” Setting
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This poem is set around Sydney Harbor—and under it. The speaker sits in his room looking out on this important Australian port. In the moonlight, he sees a vista so dark that the sea and the sky blend into "one rip of darkness." "Five bells" ring out three times over the course of the poem, marking the passing hours on the moored ships. Readers with a little nautical know-how can thus even figure out what time the poem takes place: it must be either 10:30 at night or 2:30 in the morning.
Looking out on the water, the speaker imagines what he knows is down there: Joe's bare bones, now lying beneath the moving "shadows" and "weed" of the dark harbor. The speaker travels to the past, too, remembering Joe's abandoned lodgings and the room where he and Joe used to have friendly arguments by "penny gaslight."
The mind, the poem's setting suggests, isn't bound by time or space; memory allows the speaker to travel beyond the kind of mechanical clock time measured by those echoing "five bells."
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Literary and Historical Context of “Five Bells”
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Literary Context
Kenneth Slessor (1901-1971) was one of Australia's most influential poets, known for steering Australian poetry away from the "bush ballads" (a genre of poetry that depicted life in undeveloped parts of Australia in simple, rhyming verse) and towards the experimental verse of modernism.
Modernism, which arose in response to the rapidly shifting landscape of the early 20th century, celebrated artistic experimentation and moved away from rigid formal constraints. Slessor's evocative imagery and experimental techniques are in keeping with modernist poet Ezra Pound's injunction to "make it new."
While Slessor often wrote about world-weariness and disillusionment, he also celebrated the beauty of living in the moment. Even his heaviest subject matter is often tempered by irony and an insistent love of life.
Slessor spent most of his life living near the sea in Sydney, Australia, and his poems frequently feature ocean imagery. This poem is an elegy for his friend Joe Lynch, who died in a freak accident, falling overboard on a stormy night. Collected in Slessor's 1939 book Five Bells: XX Poems, it quickly became famous and beloved across Australia.
Historical Context
Slessor got to know Joe Lynch when the two of them worked as journalists for the magazine Smith's Weekly. Lynch was a rowdy, lively man, an artist and writer, the son of a family of artistic Irish immigrants. (He's even immortalized in more than one work of art: his brother used him as a model for this statue of a smirking satyr.)
Lynch and Slessor became fast friends and drinking buddies, and all the anecdotes that Slessor records in this poem are based on fact. He and Joe indeed made a perilous night journey to Moorebank, talked of Joe's blind stonemason father, and "argued about blowing up the world" in Sydney (Lynch was, Slessor recalled, a bit of a nihilist).
Lynch died when he fell off a ferry crossing Sydney Harbor one May night in 1927. It's speculated that bottles of beer he'd stashed in his coat pockets weighed him down. His body was never found.
This sudden, shocking loss troubled Slessor for a long time. Still grieving and chewing over what had happened, he'd begin writing what would become "Five Bells" eight years later in 1935. He would stash the poem unseen in a desk drawer for some years after that yet. This intimate poem, readers might imagine, was as haunting to write as to read.
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More “Five Bells” Resources
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External Resources
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Slessor's life and work via the Poetry Foundation.
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The Poem Set to Music — Listen to a musical version of the poem.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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Slessor's Legacy — Learn about how Slessor's work continues to influence Australian artists.
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The Story of Joe Lynch — Learn more about Joe Lynch, the friend Slessor addresses in this elegy.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Kenneth Slessor
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