The Two Voices of Lord Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson · Constitution of Man Series · 18 pages

Tennyson's poem, written between 1833 and 1834 after the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam and published in the Poems of 1842. In manuscript it was titled Thoughts of a Suicide, and Tennyson's own account of writing it is given: that he was so utterly miserable, a burden to himself and his family, that he asked whether life was worth anything at all. In the poem one voice urges the other to suicide, and the poet's arguments against it range from vanity to desperation while the voice discredits every one of them.

The editorial note is unusually candid about how the poem ends — that it delivers no conclusions and has been widely criticised, the poet finding no internal affirmation and invoking solace outside himself. The dialogue is set out in full, opening with the still small voice asking whether, being so full of misery, it were not better not to be, and the answer that he will not cast in endless shade what is so wonderfully made. The image the voice offers in reply is the dragonfly leaving its old husk — an inner impulse renting the veil, clear plates of sapphire mail coming out from head to tail, the wings drying like gauze until it flies as a living flash of light — which is why the poem sits in this section rather than among the verse: it is the same figure as the serpent sloughing its skin, treated separately here.

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