Ring Out Your Bells

Ring Out Your Bells Quotes and Analysis

"All love is dead, infected/With plague of deep disdain;/Worth, as nought worth, rejected,/And Faith fair scorn doth gain."

This quote presents the main idea of the poem: all love is dead and infected. These lines are a stepping stone for the next part of the poem, where the speaker goes into further details about his feelings about love. Love has died for a few particular reasons: "worth" has bee ignored and rejected, and "faith" has been scorned. Because the male speaker feels his worth and faithfulness have been undervalued by his ex, he believes that all love is dead, not just the love between him and his mistress.

"Good Lord, deliver us!"

This is an important line in the poem, recurring as the last line in every stanza. The speaker prays to the Lord to deliver men from the pain of a woman's rejection. Depending on your interpretation, this can be read as self-pitying and desperate, or as self-mocking. In fact, these two meanings might coexist and shift as the refrain is repeated four times: by the end of the poem, we have learned that the speaker is exaggerating and acknowledging his own hypocrisy. Either way, it speaks to the pain and magnitude of heartache.

"Alas, I lie, rage hath this error bred; / Love is not dead"

speaker

This quote from stanza four constitutes a "turn" in the poem. The speaker has asserted again and again that love is dead, but now he admits that he has "lied" and made an "error" because of his rage. With this in mind, we can view the first three stanzas as hyperbolic and overwrought due to the speaker's distress. This complicates our view of his message, and especially his criticism of his former mistress.