In the first two lines of the poem, the speaker records that:
I sat all morning in the college sick bayCounting bells knelling classes to a close.
It is unusual to use the word knelling to describe the end of classes because the verb knell refers to ringing a bell, such as a church bell, to announce a death or disaster. The kinds of bells that ring to say class is over have nothing to do with death or disaster. They mark ordinary, everyday occurrences that have no ominous meaning.
The use of the word knelling in the second line tells us more about the speaker's state of mind than it does about the reality of how the bells sound. To the speaker, they seem like bells somberly announcing a death because the speaker knows that his younger brother has been tragically killed. What was once an ordinary day full of regular events, such as the end of classes, has now become anything but a normal time to the speaker.
Referring to the bells as "knelling" reveals the heightened emotional state of the speaker, for whom all events are now colored by his brother's death and thus feel funereal to him. The speaker is perceiving the world through the lens of grief, which changes and darkens his perception of all that is happening.
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