Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  “You would not let your little finger ache

  For such as these?”—”But I would die,” said she.

  He laugh’d, and swore by Peter and by Paul;

  Then fillip’d at the diamond in her ear;

  “O ay, ay, ay, you talk!”—”Alas!” she said,

  “But prove me what it is I would not do.”

  And from a heart as rough as Esau’s hand,

  He answer’d, “Ride you naked thro’ the town,

  And I repeal it”; and nodding as in scorn,

  He parted, with great strides among his dogs.

  So left alone, the passions of her mind,

  As winds from all the compass shift and blow,

  Made war upon each other for an hour,

  Till pity won. She sent a herald forth,

  And bad him cry, with sound of trumpet, all

  The hard condition; but that she would loose

  The people: therefore, as they loved her well,

  From then till noon no foot should pace the street,

  No eye look down, she passing; but that all

  Should keep within, door shut, and window barr’d.

  Then fled she to her inmost bower, and there

  Unclasp’d the wedded eagles of her belt,

  The grim Earl’s gift; but ever at a breath

  She linger’d, looking like a summer moon

  Half-dipt in cloud: anon she shook her head,

  And shower’d the rippled ringlets to her knee;

  Unclad herself in haste; adown the stair

  Stole on; and, like a creeping sunbeam, slid

  From pillar unto pillar, until she reach’d

  The gateway; there she found her palfrey trapt

  In purple blazon’d with armorial gold.

  Then she rode forth, clothed on with chastity:

  The deep air listen’d round her as she rode,

  And all the low wind hardly breathed for fear.

  The little wide-mouth’d heads upon the spout

  Had cunning eyes to see: the barking cur

  Made her cheek flame: her palfrey’s footfall shot

  Light horrors thro’ her pulses: the blind walls

  Were full of chinks and holes; and overhead

  Fantastic gables, crowding, stared: but she

  Not less thro’ all bore up, till, last, she saw

  The white-flower’d elder-thicket from the field

  Gleam thro’ the Gothic archways in the wall.

  Then she rode back cloth’d on with chastity:

  And one low churl, compact of thankless earth,

  The fatal byword of all years to come,

  Boring a little auger-hole in fear,

  Peep’d — but his eyes, before they had their will,

  Were shrivell’d into darkness in his head,

  And dropt before him. So the Powers, who wait

  On noble deeds, cancell’d a sense misused;

  And she, that knew not, pass’d: and all at once,

  With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon

  Was clash’d and hammer’d from a hundred towers,

  One after one: but even then she gain’d

  Her bower; whence reissuing, robed and crown’d,

  To meet her lord, she took the tax away,

  And built herself an everlasting name.

  The Two Voices

  First published in 1842, though begun as early as 1833 and in course of composition in 1834. See Spedding’s letter dated 19th September, 1834. Its original title was The Thoughts of a Suicide. No alterations were made in the poem after 1842.

  It adds interest to this poem to know that it is autobiographical. It was written soon after the death of Arthur Hallam when Tennyson’s depression was deepest. “When I wrote The Two Voices I was so utterly miserable, a burden to myself and to my family, that I said, ‘Is life worth anything?’” It is the history as Spedding put it of the agitations, the suggestions and counter-suggestions of a mind sunk in hopeless despondency, and meditating self-destruction, together with the manner of its recovery to a more healthy condition. We have two singularly interesting parallels to it in preceding poetry. The one is in the third book of Lucretius (830-1095), where the arguments for suicide are urged, not merely by the poet himself, but by arguments placed by him in the mouth of Nature herself, and urged with such cogency that they are said to have induced one of his editors and translators, Creech, to put an end to his life. The other is in Spenser, in the dialogue between Despair and the Red Cross Knight, where Despair puts the case for self-destruction, and the Red Cross Knight rebuts the arguments (Faerie Queene, I. ix., st. xxxviii.-liv.).

  A still small voice spake unto me,

  “Thou art so full of misery,

  Were it not better not to be?”

  Then to the still small voice I said;

  “Let me not cast in endless shade

  What is so wonderfully made”.

  To which the voice did urge reply;

  “To-day I saw the dragon-fly

  Come from the wells where he did lie.

  “An inner impulse rent the veil

  Of his old husk: from head to tail

  Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.

  “He dried his wings: like gauze they grew:

  Thro’ crofts and pastures wet with dew

  A living flash of light he flew.”

  I said, “When first the world began

  Young Nature thro’ five cycles ran,

  And in the sixth she moulded man.

  “She gave him mind, the lordliest

  Proportion, and, above the rest,

  Dominion in the head and breast.”

  Thereto the silent voice replied;

  “Self-blinded are you by your pride:

  Look up thro’ night: the world is wide.

  “This truth within thy mind rehearse,

  That in a boundless universe

  Is boundless better, boundless worse.

  “Think you this mould of hopes and fears

  Could find no statelier than his peers

  In yonder hundred million spheres?”

  It spake, moreover, in my mind:

  “Tho’ thou wert scatter’d to the wind,

  Yet is there plenty of the kind”.

  Then did my response clearer fall:

  “No compound of this earthly ball

  Is like another, all in all”.

  To which he answer’d scoffingly;

  “Good soul! suppose I grant it thee,

  Who’ll weep for thy deficiency?

  “Or will one beam be less intense,

  When thy peculiar difference

  Is cancell’d in the world of sense?”

  I would have said, “Thou canst not know,”

  But my full heart, that work’d below,

  Rain’d thro’ my sight its overflow.

  Again the voice spake unto me:

  “Thou art so steep’d in misery,

  Surely ‘twere better not to be.

  “Thine anguish will not let thee sleep,

  Nor any train of reason keep:

  Thou canst not think, but thou wilt weep.”

  I said, “The years with change advance:

  If I make dark my countenance,

  I shut my life from happier chance.

  “Some turn this sickness yet might take,

  Ev’n yet.” But he: “What drug can make

  A wither’d palsy cease to shake?”

  I wept, “Tho’ I should die, I know

  That all about the thorn will blow

  In tufts of rosy-tinted snow;

  “And men, thro’ novel spheres of thought

  Still moving after truth long sought,

  Will learn new things when I am not.”

  “Yet,” said the secret voice, “some time,

  Sooner or later, will gray prime

  Make thy grass hoar with early rime.

  “Not less swift soul
s that yearn for light,

  Rapt after heaven’s starry flight,

  Would sweep the tracts of day and night.

  “Not less the bee would range her cells,

  The furzy prickle fire the dells,

  The foxglove cluster dappled bells.”

  I said that “all the years invent;

  Each month is various to present

  The world with some development.

  “Were this not well, to bide mine hour,

  Tho’ watching from a ruin’d tower

  How grows the day of human power?”

  “The highest-mounted mind,” he said,

  “Still sees the sacred morning spread

  The silent summit overhead.

  “Will thirty seasons render plain

  Those lonely lights that still remain,

  Just breaking over land and main?

  “Or make that morn, from his cold crown

  And crystal silence creeping down,

  Flood with full daylight glebe and town?

  “Forerun thy peers, thy time, and let

  Thy feet, millenniums hence, be set

  In midst of knowledge, dream’d not yet.

  “Thou hast not gain’d a real height,

  Nor art thou nearer to the light,

  Because the scale is infinite.

  “‘Twere better not to breathe or speak,

  Than cry for strength, remaining weak,

  And seem to find, but still to seek.

  “Moreover, but to seem to find

  Asks what thou lackest, thought resign’d,

  A healthy frame, a quiet mind.”

  I said, “When I am gone away,

  ‘He dared not tarry,’ men will say,

  Doing dishonour to my clay.”

  “This is more vile,” he made reply,

  “To breathe and loathe, to live and sigh,

  Than once from dread of pain to die.

  “Sick art thou a divided will

  Still heaping on the fear of ill

  The fear of men, a coward still.

  “Do men love thee? Art thou so bound

  To men, that how thy name may sound

  Will vex thee lying underground?

  “The memory of the wither’d leaf

  In endless time is scarce more brief

  Than of the garner’d Autumn-sheaf.

  “Go, vexed Spirit, sleep in trust;

  The right ear, that is fill’d with dust,

  Hears little of the false or just.”

  “Hard task, to pluck resolve,” I cried,

  “From emptiness and the waste wide

  Of that abyss, or scornful pride!

  “Nay rather yet that I could raise

  One hope that warm’d me in the days

  While still I yearn’d for human praise.

  “When, wide in soul, and bold of tongue,

  Among the tents I paused and sung,

  The distant battle flash’d and rung.

  “I sung the joyful Paean clear,

  And, sitting, burnish’d without fear

  The brand, the buckler, and the spear

  “Waiting to strive a happy strife,

  To war with falsehood to the knife,

  And not to lose the good of life

  “Some hidden principle to move,

  To put together, part and prove,

  And mete the bounds of hate and love

  “As far as might be, to carve out

  Free space for every human doubt,

  That the whole mind might orb about

  “To search thro’ all I felt or saw,

  The springs of life, the depths of awe,

  And reach the law within the law:

  “At least, not rotting like a weed,

  But, having sown some generous seed,

  Fruitful of further thought and deed,

  “To pass, when Life her light withdraws,

  Not void of righteous self-applause,

  Nor in a merely selfish cause

  “In some good cause, not in mine own,

  To perish, wept for, honour’d, known,

  And like a warrior overthrown;

  “Whose eyes are dim with glorious tears,

  When, soil’d with noble dust, he hears

  His country’s war-song thrill his ears:

  “Then dying of a mortal stroke,

  What time the foeman’s line is broke.

  And all the war is roll’d in smoke.”

  “Yea!” said the voice, “thy dream was good,

  While thou abodest in the bud.

  It was the stirring of the blood.

  “If Nature put not forth her power

  About the opening of the flower,

  Who is it that could live an hour?

  “Then comes the check, the change, the fall.

  Pain rises up, old pleasures pall.

  There is one remedy for all.

  “Yet hadst thou, thro’ enduring pain,

  Link’d month to month with such a chain

  Of knitted purport, all were vain.

  “Thou hadst not between death and birth

  Dissolved the riddle of the earth.

  So were thy labour little worth.

  “That men with knowledge merely play’d,

  I told thee hardly nigher made,

  Tho’ scaling slow from grade to grade;

  “Much less this dreamer, deaf and blind,

  Named man, may hope some truth to find,

  That bears relation to the mind.

  “For every worm beneath the moon

  Draws different threads, and late and soon

  Spins, toiling out his own cocoon.

  “Cry, faint not: either Truth is born

  Beyond the polar gleam forlorn,

  Or in the gateways of the morn.

  “Cry, faint not, climb: the summits slope

  Beyond the furthest nights of hope,

  Wrapt in dense cloud from base to cope.

  “Sometimes a little corner shines,

  As over rainy mist inclines

  A gleaming crag with belts of pines.

  “I will go forward, sayest thou,

  I shall not fail to find her now.

  Look up, the fold is on her brow.

  “If straight thy track, or if oblique,

  Thou know’st not. Shadows thou dost strike,

  Embracing cloud, Ixion-like;

  “And owning but a little more

  Than beasts, abidest lame and poor,

  Calling thyself a little lower

  “Than angels. Cease to wail and brawl!

  Why inch by inch to darkness crawl?

  There is one remedy for all.”

  “O dull, one-sided voice,” said I,

  “Wilt thou make everything a lie,

  To flatter me that I may die?

  “I know that age to age succeeds,

  Blowing a noise of tongues and deeds,

  A dust of systems and of creeds.

  “I cannot hide that some have striven,

  Achieving calm, to whom was given

  The joy that mixes man with Heaven:

  “Who, rowing hard against the stream,

  Saw distant gates of Eden gleam,

  And did not dream it was a dream”;

  “But heard, by secret transport led,

  Ev’n in the charnels of the dead,

  The murmur of the fountain-head

  “Which did accomplish their desire,

  Bore and forbore, and did not tire,

  Like Stephen, an unquenched fire.

  “He heeded not reviling tones,

  Nor sold his heart to idle moans,

  Tho’ cursed and scorn’d, and bruised with stones:

  “But looking upward, full of grace,

  He pray’d, and from a happy place

  God’s glory smote him on the face.”

  The sullen answer slid betwixt:

  “Not that the grounds of hope w
ere fix’d,

  The elements were kindlier mix’d.”

  I said, “I toil beneath the curse,

  But, knowing not the universe,

  I fear to slide from bad to worse.

  “And that, in seeking to undo

  One riddle, and to find the true,

  I knit a hundred others new:

  “Or that this anguish fleeting hence,

  Unmanacled from bonds of sense,

  Be fix’d and froz’n to permanence:

  “For I go, weak from suffering here;

  Naked I go, and void of cheer:

  What is it that I may not fear?”

  “Consider well,” the voice replied,

  “His face, that two hours since hath died;

  Wilt thou find passion, pain or pride?

  “Will he obey when one commands?

  Or answer should one press his hands?

  He answers not, nor understands.

  “His palms are folded on his breast:

  There is no other thing express’d

  But long disquiet merged in rest.

  “His lips are very mild and meek:

  Tho’ one should smite him on the cheek,

  And on the mouth, he will not speak.

  “His little daughter, whose sweet face

  He kiss’d, taking his last embrace,

  Becomes dishonour to her race

  “His sons grow up that bear his name,

  Some grow to honour, some to shame,

  But he is chill to praise or blame.

  “He will not hear the north wind rave,

  Nor, moaning, household shelter crave

  From winter rains that beat his grave.

  “High up the vapours fold and swim:

  About him broods the twilight dim:

  The place he knew forgetteth him.”

  “If all be dark, vague voice,” I said,

  “These things are wrapt in doubt and dread,

  Nor canst thou show the dead are dead.

  “The sap dries up: the plant declines.

  A deeper tale my heart divines.

  Know I not Death? the outward signs?

  “I found him when my years were few;

  A shadow on the graves I knew,

  And darkness in the village yew.

  “From grave to grave the shadow crept:

  In her still place the morning wept:

  Touch’d by his feet the daisy slept.

  “The simple senses crown’d his head:

  ‘Omega! thou art Lord,’ they

  said; ‘We find no motion in the dead.’

  “Why, if man rot in dreamless ease,

  Should that plain fact, as taught by these,

  Not make him sure that he shall cease?

  “Who forged that other influence,

  That heat of inward evidence,

  By which he doubts against the sense?

  “He owns the fatal gift of eyes,

  That read his spirit blindly wise,