Before the Anaesthetic,
or
A Real Fright

Intolerably sad, profound

St. Giles’s bells are ringing round,

They bring the slanting summer rain

To tap the chestnut boughs again

Whose shadowy cave of rainy leaves

The gusty belfry-song receives.

Intolerably sad and true,

Victorian red and jewel1 blue,

The mellow bells are ringing round

And charge the evening light with sound,

And I look motionless from bed

On heavy trees and purple red

And hear the midland bricks and tiles

Throw back the bells of stone St. Giles,

Bells, ancient now as castle walls,

Now hard and new as pitchpine stalls,

Now full with help from ages past,

Now dull with death and hell at last.

Swing up! and give me hope of life,

Swing down! and plunge the surgeon’s knife.

I, breathing for a moment, see

Death wing himself away from me

And think, as on this bed I lie,

Is it extinction when I die?

I move my limbs and use my sight;

Not yet, thank God, not yet the Night.

Oh better far those echoing hells

Half-threaten’d in the pealing bells

Than that this “I” should cease to be—

Come quickly, Lord, come quick to me.

St. Giles’s bells are asking now

“And hast thou known the Lord, hast thou?”

St. Giles’s bells, they richly ring

“And was that Lord our Christ the King?”

St. Giles’s bells they hear me call

I never knew the Lord at all.

Oh not in me your Saviour dwells

You ancient, rich St. Giles’s bells.

Illuminated missals—spires—

Wide screens and decorated quires—

All these I loved, and on my knees

I thanked myself for knowing these

And watched the morning sunlight pass

Through richly stained Victorian glass

And in the colour-shafted air

I, kneeling, thought the Lord was there.

Now, lying in the gathering mist

I know that Lord did not exist;

Now, lest this “I” should cease to be,

Come, real Lord, come quick to me.

With every gust the chestnut sighs,

With every breath, a mortal dies;

The man who smiled alone, alone,

And went his journey on his own

With “Will you give my wife this letter,

In case, of course, I don’t get better?”

Waits for his coffin lid to close

On waxen head and yellow toes.

Almighty Saviour, had I Faith

There’d be no fight with kindly Death.

Intolerably long and deep

St. Giles’s bells swing on in sleep:

“But still you go from here alone”

Say all the bells about the Throne.