"Ring out the Old, Ring in the New": The Symbolism of Bells in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry

Images of church bells in nineteenth-century French poetry reflect the history of bells after the French Revolution, as told by Alain Corbin. Once a "sign" of locality, they become a symbol of Romantic nostalgia for rootedness and later of modernist urban dislocation. The history of the symbolism of bells also retraces the evolution of the lyric from eighteenth-century descriptive poetry to modernist non-referential semiosis. Baudelaire, in effect, marks the turning point for a modern evocation of bells, for in his poems, the once assured and bell-like voice of the Romantic poet has become cracked and rasping, and the poem itself sounds the death-knell of representation. (AB)