Tennyson, Alfred [Lord]
"Ulysses" (1833 [1842])

This blank verse poem reflect the character of Ulysses (Odysseus) who at the end of Homer's epic returns home after his years of adventures. Tennyson imagines that domestic life must have seemed too tame for Ulysses after a while and that he must have grown restless and bored.

This poem is a dramatic monologue spoken by Ulysses in his old age. It reveals his restlessness and his determination to set out for new adventures, to end life heroically rather than in peaceful dullness.

Ulysses begins by describing his current life, using such terms as "idle" and "barren." In line 10 he announces his decision not to rest. He then thinks back over the heroic life has lived already. Reflecting on his hardships, triumphs and fame makes him want more. To stop now, it seems to him, is "dull." He speaks abstractly of his adventures as "experience" and of his goal as "knowledge."

Turning his attention to what he will leave behind, Ulysses mentions his son Telemachus, a decent and prudent ruler, fit to stay at home and govern. He is in contrast to his father, the roving adventurer.

In the concluding section Ulysses approaches the port, whre his ship awaits. He calls upon his old mariners to push off for a new voyage, perhapst to end their lives at sea. They will sail westward,, into the sunset, a conventional metaphor for death. But perhaps they will reach the "Happy Isles," that paradise of heroes,, where they might find the dead Archilles. The end of the poem is a rousing cry to action: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

DETAIL:

Tennyson's first poetic invention was a special form of dramatic monologue or dramatic narrative, adapting some classical or legendary situation, reinterpreted obliquely in terms of his own predicament. This group is chiefly represented by "Ulysses." The Carlylean aspects of "Ulysses" are present in the Heroic Man press "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." For Tennyson, personally, the poem was an act of survival. Written at a time of depression and annihilating grief it gave his feeling, he said, "about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life."

But there is a discrepancy between this declared moral stance and the character of the poem, itself, which is curiously unresolved and undetermined. It rhythms are long and swelling, lyrical in their larger movement, its imagery expansive and dissolving:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; (55-67)

The one distinct objective is Achilles-Hallam, the comrade in arms who died at Troy. But this aim is far distant. The pervasive experience is the voyager's extinction into eternity, his glorious dissolution 'beyond the sunset':

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
. . .
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. (19-21; 30-32)

The discrepancy is between defiance and surrender, between the rousing moral and the poetic counterpull, between blunt, prosaic, robust good sense of Ulysses' final words and the large, vague, romantic mirage toward which he will endlessly sail, endlessly hopeful.

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