In his essay On Fairy Stories; JRR Tolkien influentially invented the word eucatastrophe - i.e. a good-catastrophe:
The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function. The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
Tolkien is saying, indirectly, that the 'happy ending' (when done well) is a special and desirable quality; and one of the main reasons why someone might want to read fairy stories.
From this perspective it is striking that one of the very best poems Tolkien wrote, The Sea Bell (see below for text) ends not in eucatastrophe, but in hopelessness - in despair.
In his Preface to The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in which poem was published; Tolkien adopts the persona of the editor of a manuscript from which The Sea Bell had been taken; and as such he notes that an unknown hand had annotated the poem with the words "Frodo's Dreme" - linking it to "the despairing dreams which visited him... during his last three years".
In the poem itself; the despair is linked to the exile from Faery; having made a sea voyage to an enchanted and perilous land, the protagonist cannot find satisfaction or peace in the normal, mundane world. In the pre-Christian world of The Lord of the Rings, a world without hope of salvation beyond death; a permanent loss of enchantment
The reader is therefore being nudged towards inferring that Frodo was the author of The Sea Bell, and that the despair reflects Frodo's personal mood of hopelessness that increased in the years after the One Ring had been destroyed - and following Frodo's claiming of the One Ring for himself, on the slopes of Orodruin and by the Cracks of Doom.
I think we are meant to regard The Sea Bell as expressive of Frodo's world view, and not therefore (as sometimes the poem is interpreted) as expressive of Tolkien's own perspective.
In a nutshell; The Sea Bell is fundamentally not a coded autobiography of JRR Tolkien, not expressive of the feelings of a man whose once participated in the enchanted world of Faery but now is exiled by old age - but instead The Sea Bell is an "in universe" poem by Frodo.
A poem in which Frodo is - symbolically, or by analogy - looking back on the core experiences of his life in relation to his interactions with the divine and demonic powers, especially his quest for the destruction of the One Ring - and what that destruction did to Frodo.
It is worth clarifying that the attitude of despair expressed by The Sea Bell is one that Tolkien as a devout Roman Catholic Christian personally rejected as sinful.
The sinfulness of the kind of despair expressed in The Sea Bell is exemplified repeatedly throughout The Lord of the Rings, for instance in relation to the Palantiri.
Tolkien's own convictions can be read in another of his poems that is also about a sea voyage to enchanted and perilous lands: The Death of St Brendan (from The Notion Club Papers) which was later revised and published as Imram.
In The Death of St Brendan; we hear the dying Bishop telling a young priest of the wonders he beheld in the lands he discovered. There is a similar sense as in The Sea Bell of having returned to a mundane and un-enchanted world in the final stanza:
In Ireland, over wood and mire,
in the tower tall and grey,
the knell of Cluain-ferta’s bell
was tolling in green Galway.
Saint Brendan had come to his life’s end
under a rainclad sky,
and journeyed whence no ship returns,
and his bones in Ireland lie.
If this was all to say - with mire, rain and bones - then the poem would tend to induce despair. But this comes after a eucatastrophic turn in which the possibility of the young priest sharing that supernatural joy - if he too is prepared to strive and labour diligently and with a good heart:
‘But men say, father that ere the end
you went where none have been.
I would here you tell me, father dear,
of the last land you have seen.’
‘In my mind the Star I still can find,
and the parting of the seas,
and the breath as sweet and keen as death
that was borne upon the breeze.
But where they they bloom those flowers fair,
in what air or land they grow,
what words beyond the world I heard,
if you would seek to know,
in a boat then, brother, far afloat
you must labour in the sea,
and find for yourself things out of mind:
you will learn no more of me.’
I enjoy that Gandalf-like, and perhaps Tolkien like, admonition: that if you want for yourself what I have had, then you need to do what I have done, and don't expect me to do it for-you!
And also, stop your endless questions: "You will learn no more of me"!
***
as a star-beam on the wet sand,
a white shell like a sea-bell;
trembling it lay in my wet hand.
In my fingers shaken I heard waken
a ding within, by a harbour bar
a buoy swinging, a call ringing
over endless seas, faint now and far.
Then I saw a boat silently float
On the night-tide, empty and grey.
‘It is later than late! Why do we wait?’
I lept in and cried: ‘Bear me away!’
It bore me away, wetted with spray,
wrapped in a mist, wound in a sleep,
to a forgotten strand in a strange land.
In the twilight beyond the deep
I heard a sea-bell swing in the swell,
dinging, dinging, and the breakers roar
on the hidden teeth of a perilous reef;
and at last I came to a long shore.
White it glimmered, and the sea simmered
with star-mirrors in a silver net;
cliffs of stone pale as ruel-bone
in the moon-foam were gleaming wet.
Glittering sand slid through my hand,
Dust of pearl and jewel-grist,
Trumpets of opal, roses of coral,
Flutes of green and amethyst.
But under cliff-eaves there were glooming caves,
weed-curtained, dark and grey’
a cold air stirred in my hair,
and the light waned, as I hurried away.
Down from a hill ran a green rill;
its water I drank to my heart’s ease.
Up its fountain-stair to a country fair
of ever-eve I came, far from the seas,
climbing into meadows of fluttering shadows;
flowers lay there like fallen stars,
and on a blue pool, glassy and cool,
like floating moons the nenuphars.
Alders were sleeping, and willows weeping
by a slow river of rippling weeds;
gladdon-swords guarded the fords,
and green spears, and arrow-reeds.
There was echo of song all the evening long
down in the valley, many a thing
running to and fro: hares white as snow,
voles out of holes; moths on the wing
with lantern-eyes; in quiet surpise
brocks were staring out of dard doors.
I heard dancing there, music in the air,
feet going quick on the green floors.
But wherever I came it was ever the same:
the feet fled, and all was still;
never a greeting, only the fleeting
pipes, voices, horns on the hill.
Of river-leaves and the rush-sheaves
I made me a mantle of jewel-green,
a tall wand to hold, and a flag of gold;
my eyes shone like the star-sheen.
With flowers crowned I stood on a mound,
and shrill as a call at cock-crow?
Why do none speak, wherever I go?
Here now I stand, king of this land,
with gladdon-sword and reed-mace.
Answer my call! Come forth all!
Speak to me words! Show me a face!’
Black came a cloud as a night-shroud.
Like a dark mole groping I went,
to the ground falling, on my hands crawling
with eyes blind and my back bent.
I crept to a wood: silent it stood
in its dead leaves; bare were its boughs.
There must I sit, wandering in wit,
while owls snored in their hollow house.
For a year and day there must I stay:
beetles were tapping in the rotten trees,
spiders were weaving, in the mould heaving
puffballs loomed about my knees.
At last there came light in my long night,
and I saw my hair hanging grey.
‘Bent though I be, I must find the sea!
I have lost myself, ,and I know not the way,
but let me be gone!’ Then I stumbled on;
like a hunting bat shadow was over me;
in my ears dinned a withering wind,
and with ragged briars I tried to cover me.
My hands were torn and my knees worn,
and years were heavy upon my back,
when the rain in my face took a salt taste,
and I smelled the smell of sea-wrack.
Birds came sailing, mewing, wailing;
I heard voices in cold caves,
seals barking, and rocks snarling,
and in spout-holes the gulping of waves.
Winter came fast; into a mist I passed,
to land’s end my years I bore;
Snow was in the air, ice in my hair,
darkness was lying on the last shore.
There still afloat waited the boat,
in the tide lifting, its prow tossing.
Wearily I lay, as it bore me away,
the waves climbing, the seas crossing,
passing old hulls clustered with gulls
and great ships laden with light,
coming to haven, dark as a raven,
silent as snow, deep in the night.
Houses were shuttered, wind round them muttered,
roads were empty. I sat by a door,
and where drizzling rain poured down a drain
I cast away all that I bore:
in my clutching hand some grains of sand,
And a sea-shell silent and dead.
Never will my ear that bell hear,
never my feet that shore tread,
never again, as in sad lane,
in blind alley and in long street
ragged I walk. To myself I talk;
For still they speak not, men that meet.
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