Time that is moved by little fidget wheels
Is not my time, the flood that does not flow.
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.
Deep and dissolving verticals of light
Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells
Coldly rung out in a machine's voice. Night and water
Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats
In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.
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;
Yet something's there, yet something forms its lips
And hits and cries against the ports of space,
Beating their sides to make its fury heard.
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!
But I hear nothing, nothing…only bells,
Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time.
Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life,
There's not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait —
Nothing except the memory of some bones
Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud;
And unimportant things you might have done,
Or once I thought you did; but you forgot,
And all have now forgotten — looks and words
And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off,
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.
Five bells.
Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder
Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain
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.
But all I heard was words that didn't join
So Milton became melons, melons girls,
And fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night,
And in each tree an Ear was bending down,
Or something that had just run, gone behind the grass,
When blank and bone-white, like a maniac's thought,
The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky,
Knifing the dark with deathly photographs.
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.
Five bells.
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:
"At Labassa. Room 6 x 8
On top of the tower; because of this, very dark
And cold in winter. Everything has been stowed
Into this room — 500 books all shapes
And colours, dealt across the floor
And over sills and on the laps of chairs;
Guns, photos of many different things
And differant curios that I obtained…"
In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare
Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,
We argued about blowing up the world,
But you were living backward, so each night
You crept a moment closer to the breast,
And they were living, all of them, those frames
And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,
And most your father, the old man gone blind,
With fingers always round a fiddle's neck,
That graveyard mason whose fair monuments
And tablets cut with dreams of piety
Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men
Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment
At cargoes they had never thought to bear,
These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.
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.
I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,
The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack,
And the short agony, the longer dream,
The Nothing that was neither long nor short;
But I was bound, and could not go that way,
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?
I looked out my window in the dark
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light
That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand
In the moon's drench, that straight enormous glaze,
And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys
Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each,
And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard
Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal
Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells,
Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.
Five bells.
Notes
On board ship a day is divided up into work periods known as watches. There are 6 four hour watches.
Each watch is divided into eight sections indicated by the ringing of bells. 8 bells is the beginning and the end of a particular watch.
Five bells is in the middle of a work period and corresponds top one of these times, 0230, 0630, 1030, 1430, 1830, 2230.
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Comments
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Five bells: spelling
From guest Jonathan Cooper (contact)
There is a spelling mistake: "ectasies" should be "ecstasies". Also, is the jounal entry meant to have misspellings ("photoes", "differant", "curioes")?
Thanks for this resource; it helps me to understand the artist John Olsen, and his paintings of the same name, better.
Oldpoetry team Note:
corrected the spelling errors; Thanks for the assistance. -
From guest BoB_AtoA_Pi3 (contact)
i believe that as he refers to Joe he is also referring to humanity, how there is in the end no real purpose and how humanity is fragmented, isolated and unable to accept anything that they do not understand and how you only see fragments of Joe can be related how you can only understand fragments of humanity and life -
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Joe Lynch was an actual friend of slessor, and it is a fact that he drowned in Sydney harbour. this poem is an elegy dedicated to joe.
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Five Bells
From guest Harry (contact)
Im am a year 10 student studying this at the moment and believe it is an amazing pice of poetry entailing both concepts of the inevitabe acceptance of death, which slessor speaks of first hand, retelling a memory of his old friend 'Joe'. It also reflects the ravaging affects of time in such a brilliant way. A five star poem which is just a fantast once you fully grasp the underlying message. -
Amazing
From guest Brittany Chapman (contact)
This is the first time I have read the poem 'Five Bells' and heard of Kenneth Slessor. Knowing that he was an Aussie make me proud to be one. The poem is a little confusing at times but all over I think that the poem is amazing. I would like to know what other experiences infulenced him to write this and other poems. -
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slessor was chiefly influenced by the death of his friend joe lynch to write this poem. funnily enough, when you study slessor, you realise how he has rather tried to distinguish himself from other australian poets by writing in a different style. generally, he did not like the australian style of rambling about the outback, and such..
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Five Bells
From guest Andrew (contact)
Kenneth slessor is one of my favourite Australian poets of all time and this poem does not dissappoint. It is full of life and beauty despite being essentially about despair, his alliteration and linguistic expertise makes his work priceless artifacts of moden Australian culture -
seems like elaborate emotions ... as a contemplative expression...
would be glad... if somebody could give a substantial explaination of this write... -
i think this poem is toatallly awsesome and i would love more sent to my email!!
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I re-visited this after years expecting it to be the great poem I remembered it to be. It isn't. The first stanza is marvellous, and in the last Slessor tries to gather again to the impact of that first stanza. For the rest, an idea of the spectral is drowned in rhetoric; there is too much presence here, of the over-fullness of language relished too much by the poet (look how inventive I can be!)for the projected absence of the poem's subject to be persuasive. It is just sounds, tediously beautiful, proliferating sounds.
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kenneth slessor rox my sox!!!
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slessor rocks!
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the epitom of teh suatralia spirit and ability to challenge the virtue of time...the fact that tim eis measured in many ways, seconds and minutes as well as life experiences and death..great piece...you see and feel Sydney harbor
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conversely, this poem has no sign of any australian spirit.
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A very touching poem, and indeed lacking in flaws.
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His best
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i think it is not good like most his poems
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According to John K Ewers in his book Creative Writing in Australia it was published in 1939. The theme of the poem is Time and he can find no answer as why he, nor Joe, nor anyone is here.
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"minimum words"???? It's three pages long! you try analysing that for an oral presentation: it takes five and a half minutes to read aloud!
Also; from what I've read, this can't be written in 1918, because Joe Lynch didn't die until 1927, and I doubt it was written just in case he happened to drown in the harbour... -
This poem is full of sadness at the loss of his good friend, Joe Lynch, who drowned in Sydney Harbour.
To me it shows the calibre of this man, saddened but realising that life does go on as the world rotates around him unaware of his grief.
Poignant but powerful.
~Von~ -
i think that the poet has written this because it symbolises the significants of the human memorie. and not forgeting his friend. i also think that the poem poem uses mimimum words with maximum impact
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Wow!! this is great!! My take is that he stands watch for his friend.That while his friends life may have been insignificant to the world, to him he meant something. He thinks of him because he misses him. I could be so far off base on this one, but that is the sense that I get.
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