The poems in Sidney’s Certaine Sonets were mostly adapted from songs, especially French and Italian songs. “Ring Out Your Bells” was titled a “Dirge” in that volume, suggesting the poem is a “slow, solemn, mournful piece of music.” To understand this title, as well as the poem, is it helpful to consider its meter in the context of the developments taking place in English-language poetry. Before the 16th century, English meter placed little importance on patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. However, in the 16th century, the culture of the European renaissance increasingly infiltrated England, bringing Petrarch’s sonnets along with French and Italian music into English courts.
Bruce Pattison writes that the Sidneys “were a musical family,” and Sidney himself was a patron of musicians and a lyricist for their music. Pattison notes that much of Sidney’s prose and poetry refers to instruments and compositions with remarkable detail. Moreover, he wrote much poetry to the tune of popular songs. Traveling in Italy and France, he was exposed to music that provided a way for him to enliven the “stiffness and poverty” of English meter (80). In imitating the musical forms of Italian meter, Sidney built on the work of Wyatt and Surrey, more firmly implanting accentual-syllabic meter in the English literary tradition.
In light of Sidney’s innovation in this field, the original title of “Ring Out Your Bells,” “Dirge,” is especially interesting. A dirge is a slow, mournful song, and as a musically attuned poet, Sidney must have known that his poem was anything but slow: its short, trimeter lines and galloping rhyme give it a sense of speed and even joy. The poem is said to be a song of mourning from the outset, and the poet himself laments his lovelessness at great length, but the meter makes the poem quick-paced and exuberant. Here, we see that Sidney not only introduced new verse forms to English, but also a new concept: that poetic form could work alongside the message of the words in the poem, reinforcing their explicit message—or in some cases undermining it, as is the case in “Ring Out Your Bells.” The rhythm of this poem lets us know that it is not truly a song of mourning, but a song about the passionate changeability of a person in a tempestuous love affair.
