Initially, the dreamy experiences have seemed as pointless as those of the poet's waking life, as when he reports a troubling and unhelpful dream in section 4: "To Sleep I give my powers away; / My will is bondsman to the dark; / I sit within a
helmless bark" (4.1-3).
And now my spirit sees The crack'd and founder'd navy of thy foes All
helmless drift on shores how like to these!
Like a passenger of a "
helmless bark" Tennyson moves alternately from numbed despair to self-awareness (IV), and finds composing poetry an anodyne for pain (V).