The Everlasting Voices - Analysis

A plea against enchantment

The poem’s central move is paradoxical: the speaker addresses something profoundly beautiful—sweet everlasting Voices—and asks it to stop. These Voices seem like the world’s own music, the kind that usually consoles or inspires. But here their sweetness has become wearying, almost tyrannical. The repeated command—opening and closing the poem—doesn’t sound triumphant; it sounds like someone trying (and maybe failing) to quiet an obsession.

What the Voices are: nature, memory, or the gods

The poem keeps the Voices half-visible: they arrive in birds, in wind on the hill, in shaken boughs, and in tide on the shore. That list matters because it’s not one symbol but a whole environment—air, trees, sea—suggesting that the Voices are not a private hallucination but a chorus woven into the world. At the same time, the speaker treats them like commanding spirits who can be sent elsewhere: Go to the guards of a heavenly fold. So the Voices are both natural and supernatural at once: the felt “meaning” in nature, but also the metaphysical pressure that meaning puts on a human life.

Old hearts versus endless song

The poem’s key tension is stated bluntly: our hearts are old. Against the Voices’ everlasting quality, the speaker puts human emotional fatigue. What’s striking is that the speaker doesn’t argue the Voices are false; instead, the complaint is about endurance. The world keeps singing, keeps summoning, keeps calling—while the heart has already used up its available wonder. The sweetness of the Voices becomes a kind of demand for responsiveness that the speaker can no longer meet.

Cosmic command, intimate exhaustion

Midway, the address suddenly scales up: the speaker orders the Voices to bid them wander—the heavenly guards—Flame under flame, till Time be no more. This is not a modest request for quiet; it’s an attempt to relocate transcendence to the farthest possible distance, to push it into an apocalyptic, end-of-time space where it can blaze without touching the speaker. That cosmic imagery makes the exhaustion more intimate: only someone deeply affected by the Voices would need them removed all the way to the edge of Time.

The refrain as a wish that won’t hold

Ending where it began—O sweet everlasting Voices, be still—creates a sense of circular struggle. The speaker can articulate the need for silence, even command it, but the poem itself must repeat the address, as if the Voices keep returning in the very act of being named. The tone, then, is tenderly conflicted: reverent in calling them sweet, but strained in begging for stillness.

A sharper question the poem leaves open

If the Voices speak through birds and tide, what would it even mean to silence them without silencing the world? The poem’s daring implication is that what the speaker wants is not just quiet but a different relationship to beauty—one that doesn’t require the heart to keep proving it is young.