Summary
The four 10-line stanzas of the poem treat Love as a sentient, mortal being that can live or die. The personification of Love creates the main conflict in the story: the speaker blames his mistress for Love's death and asks the Lord to deliver him—and other men—from this kind of suffering. The speaker uses the symbolism of death to strengthen his argument against the mistress who has scorned him. However, by the end of the poem, the speaker admits that Love has not really died. His rage and anger have led him to say so, but he has been lying. Love is still alive in his mistress' heart, even if she no longer loves him. In the final stanzas, he stops asking God to deliver men from women, instead asking Him to deliver mankind from Love itself. Therefore, he ultimately suggests not that his mistress has been especially violent, but that love is inherently violent.
The stanzas feature an AABCBCDDEE rhyme scheme and a variable iambic meter (beginning in pentameter, then switching to dimiter, then to trimeter for the remaining eight lines). The short lines, featuring end rhyme as well as internal alliteration, have a music quality that makes the syllables themselves similar to the “bells” to which the speaker repeatedly refers: they ring out. The chorus-like refrain at the end of each stanza reiterates and strengthens the speaker's plea to save men from such terror in the future.
Analysis
"Ring out your Bells" by Philip Sidney starts with a reference to a common practice when somebody in a community has died. In stanza 1, the speaker addresses the audience, telling them to begin mourning by “ring[ing] out their bells” because “Love is dead.” Importantly, this is love with a capital L: not just an individual love affair, but the entire concept of love. Sidney goes on to write that love is “infected” or sickened by the disease of disdain. Alongside love, Worth and Faith are sick as well.
In the final four lines of stanza 1, the speaker introduces a chorus that will repeat throughout the poet. He asks God to deliver “us”—men—from the women who are “ungrateful” for their worth and faith. He calls all of womankind a “franzy” (frenzy) that poorly uses men. Women, then, have killed love by their lack of interest in and respect for men. Carol Rumens writes that in this poem, "'Good Lord deliver us,' is, however, hardly prayer-like: "It might recall, rather, the exasperated, mock-comic curses of young men getting together to have a grumble about the unfair sex."
In stanza 2, the speaker continues to address the audience, now personifying Love and imagining his deathbed. Love lies on a deathbed of foolishness, and he is wrapped in a shroud of shame. He leaves as his will “false-seeming holy,” or hypocrisy.
This complicates the portrayal of Love: in the first stanza, it seems that women are wholly to blame for the death of Love. However, in this stanza, it seems that Love himself has something to be embarrassed about: Love is not truly holy, and when he dies, his only executor is “blame" (blame is also personified). This implies that Love cannot take responsibility for his own faults and actions—and that perhaps men cannot either. This stanza continues the rhyme scheme and meter established in stanza 1, again featuring strong alliteration.
Stanza 3 continues to personify Love while introducing a third character: the speaker’s mistress. First, the speaker entreats the audience to sing sad songs and read sermons on account of Love’s death. Next, he tells us where Love’s tomb can be found: his mistress’s “marble heart” is the tomb itself. Love is named “Sir Wrong,” and the epitaph on the tomb reads “Her eyes were once his dart.” Here, we learn why the speaker is crying that Love is dead: his mistress has decided he was the wrong man for her. Love is now dead in the tomb of her heart. We can interpret the epitaph “her eyes were once his dart” two ways: her eyes pierced his, like Cupid’s arrow—but it could also be read the other way around. Either way, they were once in love, but that love has since ended.
In stanza 3, the refrain takes on a more specific meaning. Whereas in stanzas one and two, it appears to ask for deliverance from womankind as a whole; in this stanza, it refers primarily to the speaker’s ex-mistress as a fanciful, frenzied female who uses men unfairly.
While continuing the rhyme scheme and meter of stanzas 1-3, stanza 4 marks a turn: whereas the first 3 stanzas insist that “Love is dead,” in this stanza, the speaker admits that he has been lying because of his own anger. Now, he admits that Love is, in fact, not dead, but rather asleep. Whereas he was last pictured dead in the tomb of her heart, he is now imagined sleeping in her mind. She will “keep his counsel”—she will hold onto him quietly—until she finds “due desert,” the person who she thinks will be the right match. In these lines, the speaker even seems to praise the woman, calling her mind "unmatched." However, he could also simply mean that she is single and has not found her match.
In the final version of the refrain, the poet varies his message slightly. He concludes that, because love is not in fact dead, it is even more incumbent that God deliver men from “so vile fancy,” or such unpleasant romantic interest. Love “tempers” men, turning them angry and forcing them into frenzies, so they would be better off without it.
By the end of the poem, then, the poet’s initial assertion—that women have killed Love with their fickleness—has been undermined. The speaker himself has been changed and tempered by romantic rejection, becoming enraged and dishonest. By the end, he asks God not to deliver him from women, but from Love itself.
