Ha! I am forever looking for noon at fourteen o'clock, and forever boring people with things that are not of general interest, and you'll never reform me, John--I'm a lost cause on both counts.
For example, I found this tidbit on the New York Stock Exchange's webpage that describes the history of the bell used to indicate the opening and closing of the stock market:
Quote:
An expert analyzed the sound of the bell for the NYSE’s trademark registration as follows: "The mark consists of the sound of a brass bell tuned to the pitch D, but with an overtone of D-sharp, struck nine times at a brisk tempo, with the final tone allowed to ring until the sound decays naturally. The rhythmic pattern is eight 16th notes and a quarter note; the total duration, from the striking of the first tone to the end of the decay on the final one, is just over 3 seconds."
https://www.nyse.com/bell/history
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Wait, nine times at a brisk tempo? Like, say, the second half of the Angelus bell pattern?
SOMEONE CALL DAN BROWN!
But the NYSE opening and closing bell is now rung for much longer than nine peals, or "just over 3 seconds." It now sounds for "
approximately ten seconds." The number of peals I counted in a few videos of NYSE closing bells ranged from 53 to 55. It doesn't go as long as an English curfew bell (here's
audio from the Curfew Tower at Windsor Castle, which goes on for more than five minutes), but it's still a whole lotta noise.
Apparently, back when the curfew was actually enforced, the curfew might be rung continuously for fifteen minutes, to give people time to get the fire-covering task done before the enforcers made their rounds.
Quote:
In the Articles for the Sexton of Faversham in England it was written of the curfew bell, "Imprimis, the sexton, or his sufficient deputy, shall lye in the church steeple; and at eight o'clock every night shall ring the curfew by the space of a quarter of an hour, with such bell as of old time hath been accustomed."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curfew_bell#History
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But unless there is civil unrest that the authorities are trying to manage, sunset seems an awfully early time to force people who need to use every minute of natural light for their labors (e.g., ploughmen) to put out their home fires and go to bed. Very bad for productivity, as a general rule. Since the ploughman in Gray's Elegy isn't even home yet, the poor fellow, I think the curfew bell in the poem is a curfew bell only in the sense of Definition #6
here.
Further evidence that this so-called "curfew bell" is actually just an evening bell: in the tear-jerker
"Curfew Must Not Ring To-night" by Rose Hartwick Thorpe, the sexton has this to say about the timing of his duties:
Quote:
“Long, long years I ’ve rung the Curfew from that gloomy, shadowed tower;
Every evening, just at sunset, it has told the twilight hour;
I have done my duty ever, tried to do it just and right,
Now I ’m old I will not falter,—
Curfew, it must ring to-night.”
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Anyway, the point of all this blather has been to say that I think the concept of the curfew and Angelus and New York Stock Exchange bells is exactly the same.
I.e., this isn't simply the tolling of an ordinary hour. It's a great avalanche of noise, marking the end of the day, however that day is defined: the workday (in the case of the Angelus and NYSE bells), or activity (in the case of curfew bell).
TL;DR: The notion of a prolonged racket marking the end of each day has been a part of life for centuries, and it seems possible that this significant "time's up" bell is what both Verlaine and Apollinaire had in mind, rather than the marking of the end of an ordinary hour.
But I wholeheartedly agree that no matter how vigorously I've speculated, all this remains mere speculation.