Five Bells

Kenneth Slessor, 1939

Kenneth Slessor (1901-1971) sits amongst names such as Francis Webb, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Les Murray, Gwen Harwood, Judith Wright, and John Forbes in the pantheon of Australia’s most important poets, with some arguing he deserves close to top billing.

Recently, more than sixty Australian poets, academics, and publishers took a stand in honour of Slessor’s reputation. As part of requesting several changes to planned chapters in the upcoming Cambridge History of Australian Poetry, the group pushed for and were successful in ensuring Slessor, known for his political conservatism and set to be overlooked, would receive his rightful due of an individual chapter on his life and work.

Slessor, a journalist and war correspondent, published Five Bells just before the outbreak of World War II in 1939. It is one of Australia’s most well-known poems, regularly cited for its excellence, particularly as an example of the then emergent Australian modernism. It is also remarkably popular, with ABC listeners in 2008 voting Five Bells, by no means an easy work with which to engage, as their favourite Australian poem.

Five Bells’ complexity, pathos, and technical proficiency make it the masterwork of a master poet, an elegy that has echoes of the great modernist T.S. Eliot, yet these don’t drown out Slessor’s unique timbre. And drowning, of course, is the poem’s ostensible subject matter. Written over several years, it encapsulates one night in the speaker’s life, a speaker who is clearly a performative version of the historical Slessor. As he watches from his apartment at night a ship in Sydney harbour and hears its bells ring, he remembers Joe Lynch’s 1927 death by drowning in the same harbour.

Joe, a cartoonist, worked on a newspaper with Slessor and was on that fateful night in ‘27 drunk on a ferry. He reportedly had beer bottles in his coat pocket, which allegedly contributed to his drowning after he fell overboard, his body never recovered.

From the outset, the poem sets up its grand themes of mortality and time’s mystery, soon applying specificity to those themes in the life and death of Joe Lynch, for whom, to paraphrase Donne, it appears Slessor’s ship bells toll. As with all great elegies – and Slessor is recognised as an elegist par excellence – Five Bells is an elegy for all humanity, sailing to an inevitable end between twin eternal poles of darkness. Yet in the poem we’re also offered, in often startling imagery, the minutiae of Lynch’s existence between those poles, and of Slessor’s time with him:

“In Melbourne, your appetite had gone, / Your angers too; they had been leached away / By the soft archery of summer rains…”

“…blank and bone-white, like a maniac’s thought, / The naphtha-flash of lightning split the sky / Knifing the dark with deathly photographs.”

Time is a major theme in modernist poetry and Five Bells is Australia’s main contribution, a work that only now is being, scandalously, omitted from anthologies of Australian poetry. As Dennis Haskell writes, the poem starts by analysing the “difference between objectively measured time and subjectively experienced time” and ends with the speaker (Slessor) not wanting time ‘moved by little fidget wheels’ to be his time. Ultimately, however, he accepts it must be – and this reality is amplified through the image of ‘bells coldly ringing out’ in imitation of the now anachronistic alarm clock.

Ironically, but perhaps fittingly given the poem’s main theme, there has been significant argument about the timing of Slessor’s writing of the poem, how long he actually knew Lynch, and why he appeared flippant in interviews about the year in which Joe’s died. It is long held that Slessor was on the ferry the night Joe died, but that has now been proved erroneous. For his part, Slessor always played down the poem as direct elegy for Joe Lynch, preferring to herd readers towards what he said was the poem’s main concern: time’s relativity.

The poem is also renowned as an example of what is interpreted as Slessor’s nihilism and there’s no escaping how brutally, yet beautifully, the poem makes plain life’s apparent meaninglessness:

“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.”

There is speculation, however, that due to Slessor’s known interest in the transmigration of the soul, the poem is not all doom and gloomy bells when it comes to our finite experience of time. Kate Lilley writes that Slessor’s “interest in metempsychosis – the transmigration of the soul at or after death into a new body” sees him often making his poetry a “potential vehicle or transport, both in terms of” vivid description that brings life to readers and “as the regenerative, interactive ground of exchange between poems, poets and readers.”

Australian poet, philosopher and critic Kevin Hart goes further, believing Five Bells has as a major theme “the weight of the dead and…the ambiguities of their possible return” (Southerly, 49.2, 1989). More recently, fellow Australian poet and critic Aidan Coleman writes in the Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry (2024) that Slessor’s work emerges from his ‘Nietzschean vitalism’, a view of life that acknowledges suffering while affirming that joy, creativity, and significant achievement remain possible.

There’s no doubting the poem is a significant achievement, often ranked amongst the greatest Australian poems. As poet Max Harris noted in his 1963 book on Slessor, after writing Five Bells “[i]t seemed that everything that went to make up the poet in Slessor conspired to make him put down his pen forever”.

While the bells in the poem are clearly those of the ship the speaker is hearing, Joseph Davis’s 2017 article, ‘Misunderstanding Kenneth Slessor’s Five Bells’, sees a doubling in the poem, both in terms of the image of the bells and in who or what is being elegised. For Davis, the ship’s bells denote life’s finitude for Slessor, Joe Lynch, and rest of us, while also alluding to other bells found in Slessor’s newspaper office. This suggests that Slessor was in Five Bells also writing an elegy for the death of his poet self that Harris mourns.

Davis notes the poem’s five bells have, for seafarers, always been confusing. Ships in the period in which Slessor wrote rang various numbers of ‘bells’ at half-hourly intervals as part of the ‘Dog Watch’. Four and eight were rung at two of the intervals, but never five. The only way to image five bells for the poem would mean the speaker listened across a half-hour interval for extra bells, then ignored those that came next.

Davis says critics have overlooked the bells to which Slessor would have been accustomed in the early 20th century newsroom. These, set to action by ‘little fidget wheels’ noted in the poem, would ring out when news was coming in from overseas on the wire system. “If the news was particularly significant,” Davis writes, “that machine rang out ‘Five Bells’”.

Davis contends that the bells in the harbour merely reminded Slessor of the five bells in the newsroom and that Slessor felt Joe Lynch’s life and death – and his own life as a poet – as much caught between those newsroom bells as the ones ringing in the harbour in which Lynch drowned. The little fidget wheels of time of which Slessor wrote were, in Davis’s view, intimations of the journalism in which Slessor worked for a living and that “swallowed up the time of the deeply serious poet Slessor so clearly was.”

Davis adds that Five Bells is more about the office than the harbour, an elegy for Slessor the poet whose “snatched moments of creative energy” came in “rushes between his workday writing” which the poem describes as the “flood that does not flow”.

Five Bells’ layers are manifold. Whether we hear it tolling Lynch’s, Slessor’s or our own deaths; the death of the artist in the young man through the cold mechanics of a newsroom or the death of a drunk artist in the cold depths of Sydney harbour, Five Bells will ring across the centuries as one of Australia’s greatest poems.