Curfew Bell - Poetry

Poetry

The tyranny of William I is described by the poet Francis Thompson,

The shiv'ring wretches, at the curfew sound,

Dejected sunk into their sordid beds,

And, through the mournful gloom of ancient times,

Mus'd sad, or dreamt of better.

Chaucer writes on the curfew bell as just as a time, not a law:

The dede slepe, for every besinesse,

Fell on this carpenter, right as I gesse,

About curfew time, or litel more.

Shakespeare had unusual times for the curfew bell,

In Romeo and Juliet, iv 4, he has Lord Capulet saying:

Come, stir, stir, stir, the second coch hath crow'd,

The curfew bell hath rung, tis three o'clock.

In Tempest, v. 1, Prospero says:

You, whose pastime

Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice

To hear the solemn curfew.

In King Lear, iii. 4, Edgar speaks,

This is the foul fiend, Flibbertigibbet: he begins at curfew

and walks to the first clock.

In the sixteenth century Bishop Joseph Hall's "Fourth Satire" it reads:

Who ever gives a paire of velvet shooes

To th' Holy Rood, or liberally allowes,

But a new rope to ring the couvre-few bell,

But he desires that his great deed may dwell,

Or graven in the chanel window glasse,

Or in his lasting tombe of plated brasse.

In the play The Merry Devil of Edmonton (published 1608), the curfew was at nine o'clock in the evening:

Well, 'tis nine a clocke, 'tis time to ring curfew

John Milton's put in his allegorical Il Penseroso's mouth the words:

Oft on a plat of rising ground,

I hear the far-off curfew sound,

Over some wide-water'd shore,

Swinging slow, with sullen roar...

In Handel's L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato these words are accompanied by a pizzicato bass-line, representing a distant bell sound.

T. S. Eliot Gus the theater cat ("Old possum's book of practical cats")

When the curfew was rung, then I swung on the bell!