The turning of the year is always bittersweet. We look back with gratitude, sometimes with sorrow — and we look forward with hope, sometimes with trembling. We stand between “what has been” and “what may yet be.” Few poems capture that holy tension like Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells.” It appears as Canto CVI in his long work In Memoriam, written over many years in the wake of the early death of his closest friend, Arthur Hallam.