Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight

The story involves Bessie, a young woman whose lover, Basil Underwood, has been arrested, thrown in prison by the Puritans and sentenced to die that night when the curfew bell rings.

Knowing that Oliver Cromwell will be late in arriving, the young woman begs the old sexton to prevent the ringing of the curfew bell.

The material upon which Rose Hartwick Thorpe based her poem is Lydia Sigourney's article "Love and Loyalty", which appeared posthumously in Peterson's Magazine in September 1865.

[3] In Smith's account, the young woman, Blanche Heriot, has a lover known as Neville Audley, and the action takes place in 1471 during the Wars of the Roses in England.

As he recalled, "The picture of that swaying young figure hanging heroically to the clapper of an old church bell lived in my memory for a quarter of a century.

In her novel Anne of Green Gables (1908), set in Prince Edward Island, author Lucy Maud Montgomery has the character Prissy Andrews recite it.

She provides a melodramatic reading while a revolutionary new computer created by Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy) prints out the poem in response to a misspelled request for information on Corfu.