Hear the trumpets sing,
And hear the alarm bells ring!
For Bindas has arrived.
Two calls answer each other before we know why. Trumpets suggest fanfare, celebration, someone worth heralding — but alarm bells complicate that instantly, and the poem trusts you to sit in that friction rather than resolving it. Is Bindas a triumph or a warning? The piece never says, and that refusal is the whole point: arrivals worth announcing are rarely simple. The mood is ceremonial, almost theatrical, like a herald clearing the road for a procession that could just as easily be a parade or a reckoning.
Then the third line lands with plain, almost anticlimactic directness — no ornament, just a name and a fact. That flatness after two lines of ringing sound is the real turn; it deflates the grandeur into something personal and immediate. Read it again and the bells and trumpets stop being weather and start sounding like your own pulse, reacting before your mind catches up.
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