The speaker has lost his religious convictions and thus feels like he has lost his artistic productivity and his reason for existence. Caged Bird. Langston Hughes.
Phenomenal Woman. The poem is also one of Tennyson’s longer works, featuring 154 stanzas of three lines each. Dreams. Tennyson wrote the poem, titled "Thoughts of a Suicide" in manuscript, after the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833. The speaker cries that it is hard to pull up his resolve from this emptiness.
The poem was written between 1833 and 1834 but published in the 1842 volume of The poem is set up, as the title suggests, as a debate between two voices in one man’s head. The speaker mournfully calls the voice “dull, one-sided,” and wonders “wilt thou make everything a lie, / To flatter me that I may die?” He says he knows life is difficult and it is sometimes “rowing hard against the stream” but that the man who does this hard work and toil in life can gaze upon God’s glory when it is his time to die. The poem is renowned for the tension between his two voices; even though by the end it appears that the speaker has chosen life, that conclusion is not entirely predictable throughout the conversation.In particular, the speaker tries to provide reasons to live: the uniqueness and grandness of the human will (“No compound of this earthly ball / Is like another, all in all”); his hopefulness that his misery will eventually abate (“Some turn this sickness yet might take, / Ev’n yet”); that it is better to wait because each month brings changes (“Each month is various to present / The world with some development”); that other men will look down upon him for departing before his time (“men will say / Doing dishonour to my clay”); that dying now might be selfish and he should wait for natural death; that dying nobly is better (“But looking upward, full of grace, / He pray’d, and from a happy place / God’s glory smote him on the face”); and that maybe he does not truly wish for death (“Whatever crazy sorrow saith, / No life that breathes with human breath / Has ever truly long’d for death”). Maya Angelou.
The voice evokes the memory of the speaker’s dead friend, saying that the man is gone and cannot answer, cannot feel emotion, and is “chill to praise or blame.”The speaker listens and responds, commenting that the “vague voice” cannot truly prove the dead are dead. The Two Voices First published in 1842, though begun as early as 1833 and in course of composition in 1834. The voice replies that he saw a dragonfly come from the well where he was waiting, and burst out of his “old husk” into sleek brilliance. Two voices, one song And anywhere you are you know I'll be around And when you call my name I'll listen for the sound If I could wish for one thing I take the smile that you bring Wherever you go in this world I'll come along Together we dream the same dream Forever I'm here for you, you're here for me Oh ooh oh two voices one song
The voice replies that the speaker will grow old and gray. The voice says scornfully it is the Sabbath morn.The speaker sees the freshness of dawn and hears the pealing of the church bells.
Maya Angelou. “The Two Voices” is a difficult poem; its subject matter—wondering whether or not to commit suicide out of grief for a loved one’s death—is easily accessible, but the images and metaphysical arguments are often quite complex. He wonders if he came from a “nobler place, / Some legend of a fallen race” or rather “thro’ lower lives.” He feels like something remains for him on earth; there are glimpses of dreams and something not yet done. Edgar Allan Poe.
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening. The voice is gone. He knows about the sense of mystery and eternity, the war of baseness and good, and the heaven within oneself. The Two Voices The Two Voices is a poem by Alfred Tennyson written between 1833 and 1834, published in his 1842 volume of Poems. Robert Frost. The speaker says that every month of life brings some new development, and perhaps it is better to wait and bide his time to see if things change. If You Forget Me. The family “made unity so sweet” that the speaker’s frozen heart begins to beat again. Still I Rise. He falls quiet. Not affiliated with Harvard College.Osborne, Kristen. The voice tells the speaker he has not “dissolved the riddle of the earth,” and his labor has been in vain. "Crossing the bar" is a phrase that is a military (naval) phrase that is used to inform someone about that someone has died. After a brief pause, the voice replies that the speaker’s father’s life, like many lives on earth, was full of “nothings, nothing-worth, / From that first nothing ere his birth / To that last nothing under earth!”The speaker tells the voice his words are ambiguous, and he proceeds to wonder at his own origins. The Mephistophelean voice, which critics and modern readers tend to argue is more persuasive, has its own arguments to combat the speaker’s hesitation and hopefulness: the misery is so great that it is better not to exist; that one human being is meaningless in the grand scheme of things (“Or will one beam be less intense, / When thy peculiar difference / Is cancell’d in the world of sense?”); that he should go before his peers and discover great knowledge (“Forerun thy peers, thy time, and let / Thy feet, millenniums hence , be set / In midst of knowledge, dream’t not yet”); that growing old and infirm is terrible (“’Twere better not to breathe or speak, / Than cry for strength, remaining weak”); that men will barely remember his name after he is gone (“Do men love thee?