The Bell That Tolls — A Poem of Human Failings

 

The Bell That Tolls

In the depths, in the dark,
in the smoke and in the fire‑glow,
the dragging shuffle of feet,
first the few, and then the many,
descend.

Deep and down,
the bell‑toll sounds,
marking the hour of the everlast.

Here it speaks to the doom of men:
that they forget—
that they neglect, and so cease to reflect,
that the darkness binds more tightly than the light.

No erudite voices rise.
Only the noise,
loud in the mind’s own suffocating quiet:
incoherent, the guttural mimicking echoes,
of a hive‑like mind, the mob made one,
together in their regressing memory.

Times of plenty lie to all;
within them kingdoms rise and fall.
Societies grow, then wither away into yesterday,
and the fall is always long… and ignoble.

Stygian pasts in the sunlit shadows wait,
ready to become again and again,
unless remembered,
unless guarded against carefully.

The children of man, ignorant,
only knowing what they have been told,
the truths hidden away in banished tomes,
the doom their elders called down upon themselves,
and on their progeny,
that inheritance — the consequence
of the light of knowledge… withheld.

For darkness always returns.
Always returns to man,
when they forget,
and when they withhold.

The persona does not dwell in the light.
It dwells in the inward dark,
and must be lit by knowledge,
by thought,
by remembering—
for without that light,
it forgets —
and in that deep where the psyche hides itself,
when forgetting has hollowed it thin and frail,
the bell tolls again —
a sound drawn from within,
the repudiation of a mind
that returned itself to its dark design
by neglect,
and by forgetting.

And so the bell tolls once again the doom of man,
through the darkened caverns of the intellect,
down into the sewers of the mind
where disremembering becomes decay,
its stench rising to dismay,
ignorance and darkness — the price that’s paid,
into the hour of everlast —
the hour of the toll that men forget.

Copyright May 2026 M. W. Van Dyke
All Rights Reserved