On Courthouse Bells by Jim Burrows
by Benjamin Myers, Oklahoma Poet Laureate Emeritus
Hello, I’m former Oklahoma Poet Laureate Benjamin Myers, and I would like to share with you a poem by Jim Burrows.
Jim Burrows is a poet and real estate appraiser based in Stillwater, Oklahoma, but born and raised in Cordell. He is the author of the 2015 poetry collection Back Road. His poems have appeared in Rattle, The Southwest Review, The Dark Horse, Oklahoma Today, PN Review, and many other journals.
My favorite poem by Jim Burrows is called “The Courthouse Bells.” There are still a fortunate few county seats scattered across Oklahoma where an original county courthouse is preserved, a building in stately stone or brick: a serious building. If the people of these towns are very lucky, they can still hear the bells and watch the clock on the courthouse tower. These people are fortunate to live in something more than merely personal time, something bigger than the time marked on our wrists or on the phones in our pockets. The clock and bell announces the time publicly, binding all within eyeshot and earshot to a common rhythm of the day, a shared sense of time’s passing, or, perhaps, of time’s repeating.
In “The Courthouse Bells,” Burrows writes of one such fortunate community. For Burrows, the courthouse bells are a reminder of time’s persistent passing and of our shared fate. His poem is a modern memento mori, a reminder of our common lot of mortality.
Here is the poem:
THE COURTHOUSE BELLS
They haven’t been themselves for many years,
Maybe even since I myself was young,
But I can’t tell the difference. To my ears,
The played recording and the iron tongue
Are one and the same. The original courthouse bell,
Until just recently, resided there
On the first floor on a great pedestal,
Protected from some danger in the air
By a glass case. Or do I have that wrong? It was the workings of the turret clock—
I see it now, a wicked looking thing
Like something out of Kafka—you could walk
Up to and learn about. You’d read the plaque
On the great base, pretend to contemplate
Life for a second, then admit your lack
Of interest and move on—like all the late
So-and-sos scattered all around this town
On plaques and custom bricks and cornerstones,
The men in coats and ties that all went down
Clean-shaven to the grave. It’s the other ones,
The ones there’s nothing left of, that can hold
My interest. When I lie in bed at night
And listen, when the wind stills and the world grows old
A minute, with that music in the gray light,
I can almost believe in all those nameless souls,
The ones it’s hard to think I’ll ever be
As dead as. But then the music stops, and the tolls
Begin, the tolls that have no melody
Or memory, and are hard to focus on
For long enough to count. Then sleep will come
Easily, and I lose the will to listen,
And something not quite silence fills the room.
Used with Permission.
Like the early Romantic poet Thomas Gray in his famous “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Burrows chooses quatrains—four lined stanzas—crossed-rhymed A,B,A,B for his meditation on time. This stanza form, sometimes referred to as “elegiac quatrains,” can convey great solemnity and seriousness, with the ghost of Thomas Gray gently haunting the poem.
In the poem’s opening stanza we feel already time’s fleeting quality in the poet’s uncertainty about his own memories. When did the real bell cease ringing? When were the artificial bells substituted for the real thing? Was it the bell or the guts of the clock on display at the courthouse? Most of us in midlife or beyond can recognize in ourselves this encroaching haziness about the past.
But rather than shrug it off and distract himself with his phone, the poet leans into this poignant reminder of his own life’s limits. He moves from thinking about the courthouse to thinking about all the plaques and monuments of the town. He thinks about the town’s illustrious dead, but from these locally well-known names he passes quickly into meditation on the anonymous deceased, those whom Thomas Gray called, “the unhonour’d Dead.” These are the people with whom the poet identifies.
And these are the people he thinks about as he lies in bed at night. Though part of him finds it hard to believe, he knows that he will someday be gone like they are now. This poem, however, is not about raging against the dying of the light. There is a sense of uneasy peace at the end. In an increasingly rare moment free of distraction, the speaker of the poem lets himself lose count of the bells and drift off to sleep with the sound of the bells echoing like the knowledge of something we can’t quite face but also can’t possibly not know. The bells, like some poems, confront us with beauty and give us the courage to accept that we share the common human condition.
For Poets on the Plains, I’m Benjamin Myers, chatting with you from Chandler, Oklahoma.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Benjamin Myers is the Crouch-Matthis Professor of Literature and the director of the Great Books Honors Program at Oklahoma Baptist University. A former poet laureate of Oklahoma, he is the author of four books of poetry. His work has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Image, The Yale Review, 32 Poems, Rattle, and The South Carolina Review, and his sonnet sequence, Black Sunday, was praised by The Wallstreet Journal as one of the “five best books on the dust bowl.” He is a contributing editor for Front Porch Republic and lives in Chandler, OK. His most recent book of poems is The Family Book of Martyrs (2023), and his second book of nonfiction, Ambiguity and Belonging, was recently published by Belle Point Press.
Benjaminmyerspoetry.com
OKLAHOMA – FEATURED POET
Jim Burrows was born and raised in Cordell, Oklahoma and graduated from Southwestern Oklahoma State University. He is the author of Back Road (Barefoot Muse Press, 2015). His poems have appeared in Rattle, The Southwest Review, The Dark Horse, Oklahoma Today, PN Review, and many other journals. He lives in Cordell, Oklahoma. (The Courthouse Bells)
