"Noel: Christmas Eve 1913" is a short poem by Robert Bridges in which a solitary speaker walks out on a frosty Christmas Eve and hears distant church bells ringing across the valley. The pealing sounds lift his thoughts back to that very first Christmas, when shepherds in the fields could not tell whether the music they heard came from angels or the stars themselves. Standing alone on the hillside, he finds in those far-off bells something ancient, tender, and consoling — a sound transformed by time into something close to the eternal.

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