No More Learning

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 [1] 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.