POPPIES, ORANGES AND LEMONS by Penny Dolan.

November, so far, has been full of images of poppies, especially those symbolic ceramic poppies.  One Hundred Years.

However, my post today is about an earlier moment commemorating the dead.

 

 

All History Girls readers will surely know the children’s song “Oranges and Lemons”, listing the sounds of all the different church bells within the City of London, with the familiar opening line that echoes the ring changes of St Clements Danes church.  

 

Sometime, at the end of the First World War, the poet and writer Eleanor Farjeon chose those familiar bells as a subject for a poem, offering an explanatory foot-note which, for the purpose of this blog, is coming first.

“When the half-muffled City Bells rang out in Commemoration of the Bell-Ringers who fell in the war, the bells of St Clement Danes could not take part owing to a defect in the frame work.”

 

Finally, here is Farjeon's poem, commemorating a small moment of unwanted silence amid the aftermath of the Great War:

THE CHILDREN’S BELLS

Where are your Oranges?

Where are your Lemons?

What, are you silent now,

Bells of St Clement’s?

You, of all bells that rang

Once in Old London,

You, of all bells that sang

Utterly undone?

You whom all children know

Ere they know letters,

Making Big Ben himself 

Call you his betters?

Where are your lovely tones

Fruitful and mellow,

Full- flavoured orange-gold,

Clear lemon yellow?

Ring again, sing again,

Bells of St Clement’s,

Call as you swing again,

“Oranges! Lemons!”

Fatherless children

Are listening near you –

Sing for the children,

The fathers will hear you.

The poem was chosen by Walter De la Mare’

for his 1923 “Come Hither” anthology, offered “for the Young of All Ages”.

Penny Dolan