Five Bells
"Five Bells" is a 1939 elegy by Australian poet Kenneth Slessor, written in memory of his friend Joe Lynch who drowned in Sydney Harbour in 1927. The poem is considered one of the finest achievements in Australian poetry, exploring themes of death, memory, time, and the inability to truly know or preserve the dead.
The title refers to five bells of the ship's watch system (10:30 PM), marking both time at sea and the passage of years since Lynch's death. The poem moves between past and present, memory and loss, as the speaker stands by the harbour contemplating his friend's death and the relentless flow of time symbolized by the tidal waters.
Slessor's modernist technique combines vivid sensory imagery of Sydney Harbour with philosophical meditation on mortality. The poem's recurring motif of bells structures its exploration of how the dead exist only in memory, yet memory itself proves inadequate to restore or preserve them. The harbour becomes both the site of death and a metaphor for time's indifferent flow.
The Poem
Is not my Time, the flood that does not flow.
Between the double and the single bell
Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells
From the dark warship riding there below,
I have lived many lives, and this one life
Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.
Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells
Coldly rung out in a machine's voice. Night and water
Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats
In air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.
These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought
Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth,
Gone even from the meaning of a name;
Yet something's there, yet something forms its lips
And hits and cries against the ports of space,
Beating their sides to make its fury heard.
In agonies of speech on speechless panes?
Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!
Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time.
Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life,
There's not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait—
Nothing except the memory of some bones
Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud;
And unimportant things you might have done,
Or once I thought you did; but you forgot,
And all have now forgotten—looks and words
And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off,
Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales
Of Irish kings and English perfidy,
And dirtier perfidy of publicans
Groaning to God from Darlinghurst.
Five bells.
Note: This is an excerpt. The complete poem is significantly longer.
Context and Composition
Kenneth Slessor wrote "Five Bells" over a decade after Joe Lynch's death by drowning in Sydney Harbour on the night of January 27, 1927. Lynch, an artist and bohemian figure in Sydney's cultural circles, was returning from a party when he fell from a ferry near Bradley's Head. His body was recovered several days later.
The long interval between Lynch's death and the poem's composition reflects Slessor's complex process of grief and artistic response. By 1939, the immediacy of loss had transformed into philosophical meditation on memory, time, and mortality. The poem emerged during Slessor's most productive period, published in his collection Five Bells: XX Poems.
Themes and Interpretation
Memory and Loss: The poem explores the inadequacy of memory to preserve the dead. The speaker can recall only fragmentary details ("looks and words / And slops of beer") which fail to resurrect the complete person. Lynch exists only "between five bells," suspended in the artificial measure of ship's time.
Time and Mortality: Slessor contrasts mechanical time ("moved by little fidget wheels") with experiential time ("the flood that does not flow"). The harbour's tides become a metaphor for time's relentless passage, indifferent to human loss. The bells that mark maritime watches also toll for human mortality.
Sydney Harbour as Symbol: The harbour functions as both specific location and universal symbol. Its waters that drowned Lynch also represent time, memory, and the unconscious. The vivid imagery ("Deep and dissolving verticals of light") creates a dreamlike atmosphere where past and present merge.
Critical Reception
"In her essay "'Living Backward' : Slessor and Masculine Elegy" (1997) Kate Lilley noted: "Chronologically displaced, “Five Bells” is repositioned and reread as the generically appropriate marker of the premature end of Slessor's career, and also as the aesthetically satisfying rhetorical proof of his poetic achievement. But the discursive meaning and affect [sic] generated by, and attributed to, Slessor's elegy exceed the boundaries of even the most expansive consideration of Slessor as poet, while also being disconnected from an analysis of genre."
The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature stated: "Although the emphasis is on the impermanence of all human relationships and thus the triumph of time (moved by 'little fidget wheels') over life, the affection exposed for the scruffy, unruly, unimportant Irishman gives the poem a tender and human character."
In his book Reading Australian Poetry Andrew Taylor commented "It is a powerfully moving poem, in which the sharp note of anguish is unmistakeably audible. But the poem's significance depends as much on how it came to be said as on any emotions that may be generated by it."
Legacy
The poem has become a touchstone for Australian poetry, frequently anthologized and studied. Its meditation on Sydney Harbour has influenced how the landmark is perceived in Australian culturem, not merely as scenic beauty but as a site of mortality, mystery, and time's passage.
A sculpture, made by Joe Lynch's brother Frank Lynch, commemorating his brother was installed in the the Royal Botanic Garden, near the Sydney Opera House gate, specifically looking out towards the area of the harbour where Joe Lynch drowned.