Ulysses

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Ulysses

Alfred, Lord Tennyson 1833

“Ulysses” is based upon the Odyssey, written by the Greek poet Homer, who is known to have lived some time before 700 B.C. In that tale, Ulysses is gone from his home for thirty years: for ten years he is involved in fighting in the Trojan war, and the journey back from Troy to his homeland of Ithaca takes him through a series of adventures that last another twenty years. Another source that Tennyson is assumed to have used, that is similar in spirit to this poem, is the Inferno, by Dante Alighieri. In Canto XXVI of that poem, Ulysses is unable to give up his life of adventure and returns to the sea, as he does in this poem.

“Ulysses” was written in 1833 but not published until 1842, in Tennyson’s Poems. This collection marked the poet’s return to publication after a period referred to as his “ten years’silence.” Tennyson has identified the source of the poem’s emotion as rising from his feelings about the death of his college friend, Arthur Hallam, when Tennyson was twenty four. Although they knew each other for only five years, Hallam had a profound influence on Tennyson’s life and work. (One of the poet’s greatest accomplishments, the long poem In Memoriam, directly addresses his feelings about Hallam’s life and early death.) Tennyson related his friend’s death to this tale of a Ulysses’ desire to return to a life of adventure on the sea when he noted in his Memoir that the poem “gave my feelings about going forward, and braving the struggle of life.”

Tennyson’s noble sentiment is not entirely accurate in describing this poem, though. The speaker of this poem is braving life’s struggles to some extent, but he is also abandoning his family and responsibilities in what some have called a selfish pursuit of adventure. Ulysses’ feelings about adventure are best expressed in lines 19-20, where the speaker observes that “all experience is an arch wherethrough / Gleams that untravelled world....” The experiences of Ulysses’ travels away from home have opened bridges to new adventures that are so attractive, or gleaming, that going for them can be seen equally as being either brave or self-gratifying.

Author Biography

Tennyson was born in 1809 in Somersby, Lincolnshire. The fourth of twelve children, he was the son of a clergyman who maintained his office grudgingly after his younger brother had been named heir to their father’s wealthy estate. According to biographers, Tennyson’s father, a man of violent temper, responded to his virtual disinheritance by indulging in drugs and alcohol. Each of the Tennyson children later suffered through some period of drug addiction or mental and physical illness, prompting the family’s grim speculation on the “black blood” of the Tennysons. Biographers surmise that the general melancholy expressed in much of Tennyson’s verse is rooted in the unhappy environment at Somersby.

Tennyson enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827. There he met Arthur Hallam, a brilliant undergraduate who became Tennyson’s closest friend and ardent admirer of his poetry. Hallam’s enthusiasm was welcomed by Tennyson, whose personal circumstances had led to a growing despondency: his father died in 1831, leaving Tennyson’s family in debt and forcing his early departure from school; one of Tennyson’s brothers suffered a mental breakdown and required institutionalization; and Tennyson himself was morbidly fearful of falling victim to epilepsy or madness. Hallam’s untimely death in 1833, which prompted the series of elegies later comprising In Memoriam, contributed greatly to Tennyson’s despair. In describing this period, he wrote: “I suffered what seemed to me to shatter all my life so that I desired to die rather than to live.” For nearly a decade after Hallam’s death Tennyson published no poetry. During this time he became engaged to Emily Sell-wood, but financial difficulties and Tennyson’s persistent anxiety over the condition of his health resulted in their separation. In 1842 an unsuccessful financial venture cost Tennyson nearly everything he owned, causing him to succumb to a deep depression that required medical treatment. Tennyson later resumed his courtship of Sellwood, and they were married in 1850. The timely success of In Memoriam, published that same year, ensured Tennyson’s appointment as Poet Laureate, succeeding William Wordsworth. In 1883 Tennyson accepted a peerage, the first poet to be so honored strictlgy on the basis of literary achievement. Tennyson died in 1892 and was interred in Poet’s Corner of Westminister Abbey.

Poem Text

   It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
   I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. All times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea. I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known— cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honored of them all—
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch where through
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself.
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave me scepter and the isle—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centered in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
   There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought
       with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads— you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of notable note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
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.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we
       are—
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Poem Summary

Lines 1-5

This poem begins with Ulysses having come home from the thirty-year adventure(which included participation in the Trojan War) that is the subject of Homer’s long poem, “The Odyssey,” and having resumed his position as king of Ithaca. This opening stanza establishes the speaker’s discontent in its first words, “It little profits,” and goes on to describe the role of king in negative, unappealing terms: the land he rules is seen as “these barren crags,” his wife “aged,” and even the traditionally most comforting image of home life, the fireplace hearth, is “still,” offering no warmth. The king’s subjects are described as “a savage race,” and their actions, sleeping and eating, are basic animal behavior; the only thing they do that might require human thought, the capacity to see beyond the immediate moment, is the greedy act of hoarding.

But the speaker balances this unflattering view of his home and subjects with contempt for himself. He describes himself as “an idle king,” and notes the unfairness of the laws that he passes, calling them “unequal.” By the end of the stanza, it becomes clear that the problem with his reign is not the shortcomings of either his subjects or himself, but the fact that he is not mentally matched to the people he leads. He feels distant from the people that he is supposed to rule because they “know not me.” Here Tennyson gently implies Ulysses’ wisdom, by making him realize that a king and his subjects are not suited if they cannot understand each other. He also implies that there is a bit of egotism involved on Ulysses’ part by having him phrase the misunderstanding in this way, instead of “I know not them” or “we know not each other.”

Lines 6-17

In these lines Ulysses remembers his travels fondly, even those times when he was alone and those times when he was sailing a turbulent sea. Line 6 contains a structure(Ulysses making a direct statement about himself, followed by a semicolon that indicates that further explanation is to come) that will be repeated two more times in this stanza, in lines 11 and 18. The “lees” referred to in line 7 are the sediment at the bottom of a cup of wine: in his enthusiasm to “drink life to the lees” the speaker wants to fully experience all things, good and bad. The Hyades mentioned in line 10 are sisters, daughters of Atlas, who according to legend were turned into a constellation of stars by Zeus, king of the gods. By saying that they vexed, or tormented, the sea with blowing sheets of rain(“scudding drifts”), the speaker is suggesting that the constellation influences the sea and weather, as he is describing the worst conditions that a sailor might face. Even although he is as aware of the horror and danger as he is of the quiet times, he still wants, as stated in line 6, to travel again.

The unusual diction of “I am become a name” in line 11 gives the phrase an unmoving, static quality, removing some of the minor motion that would be implied by “I have become a name”: this strengthens the contrast between Ulysses’ present stationary life with all of the action the poem has described. Being a name grants Ulysses the glory of the legend that is associated with his name(as described in lines 12-17), but it also reduces his existence to just one word.

Lines 18-21

In these lines, Ulysses states the philosophic problem that is troubling him: he has had an effect on everything that he has come into contact with, but every experience has inevitably led to more experiences(every experience is an “arch” or passage to new experiences—“that untravelled world”). However, like the horizon, which always recedes as you try to approach it, the border(“margin”) of that new world “fades” away as Ulysses moves toward it.

Lines 22-32

In this section of the poem, Ulysses convinces himself that the best thing to do would be to leave Ithaca and become a wanderer again. To start with, in lines 22 and 23 he makes the quiet inactive life seem not only boring but useless. The word “dull” in line 22 suggests boredom, but line 23—which evokes the image of a sword that rusts when it is unpolished(“unburnished”) and shines when it is used—subtly connects dullness with uselessness, implying that while he is inactive Ulysses feels as useless as a dull(meaning both blunt and unpolished) sword. (This is a good example of what many people like about poetry: the packing of a lot of meaning into just a few words.) With his exclamation in line 24, in which he makes a distinction between truly living and simply breathing, his thought takes on a sense of urgency. Lines 24-26 indicate that many lives would not be enough for this speaker, and that there is not much left of the one he has. Each hour saved from death, therefore, must not be a mere passage of time, but rather be made meaningful with new experience. After he considers(in lines 28-30) that leaving this potential unfulfilled would even be ignoble(“vile it were ... to store and hoard myself), the stanza ends with grand, uplifting language in the last two lines. What was previously portrayed as discomfort and discontent becomes a noble quest “to follow knowledge like a sinking star / Beyond the utmost bond of human thought.”

Lines 33-43

In this stanza Ulysses describes his son Telemachus, who is to take over control of the kingdom when he leaves. It is important that Tennyson has Ulysses state his bond to Telemachus twice in line 33(“my son, mine own”) because the son is then described by the father as having the opposite qualities to his own. Telemachus and his actions are described using words like “discerning,” “prudent,” “soft,” “good,” “blameless,” “centered,” and “tender,” qualities that come from the kind of cautious living that Ulysses has already established is not for him. Still, he recognizes that a personality like Telemachus’ is better suited than his own to “make mild / A rugged people” (lines 36-7). Regardless of what Ulysses might admire in-Telemachus, and how confident he is of his son’s ability to lead the population of Ithaca, the stanza ends with a flat statement that points out the basic difference between father and son: “He works his work, I mine.”

Lines 44-53

The first two lines of this stanza continue a tendency, begun in the previous stanza with “this is my son,” to localize the setting of this poem in a particular place (“There lies the port”; “There gloom the dark, broad seas”). By line 45, the physical location is so directly established that the speaker, who for most of the poem speaks to no one in particular or speaks to himself, directly addresses the mariners who have sailed with him before. This apparent inconsistency in the narrative voice has been identified by some critics as a flaw in Tennyson’s presentation.

The verb used in conjunction with the seas in line 45 is “gloom,” which is commonly used as a noun today; this is a way for Ulysses to mention, as he did earlier in the poem, the bad aspects of the life he desires as well as the good. This wide scope of events is shown even more directly in line 48, where he brings up “the thunder and the sunshine.” Line 47 uses another familiar word in an unfamiliar way: “frolic,” which is used today as a verb and sometimes as a noun, is an adjective here, describing the mariners’ welcome of the weather.

In lines 48-49, Ulysses makes reference to the fact that he and his crew “opposed / Free hearts, free foreheads.” Since most Greek city-states operated under systems of slavery, many of the opponents Ulysses faced in battle were slaves. By specifying that his mariners “opposed” adversity with free in hearts and minds, Ulysses presumably is emphasizing the nobility of his crew, stressing that they were not mere slaves who met challenges because they were forced to. Similarly, line 53, in referring to the Greek gods who, according to legend, played an active part in the Trojan war, he inspires his men with pride in their past accomplishments. In addition, this suggests that not only are these men much more than slaves, they are rivals to the gods.

Lines 54-61

The imagery of lines 54 and 55 is of sunset, a fitting time of departure for a ship full of old men who know that they will probably not survive the journey. In lines 55-6, the sound the ocean makes is suggestive of the moans of sailors who have already died and sunk into the deep sea. Even while reminding his men of their impending death(and, in line 61, of his own impending death), Ulysses encourages them to “seek a newer world,” and to brace themselves in the boat in order to bring their oars down vigorously against the sea’s waves—“smite the sounding furrows.” Their destination is nowhere specific, just west, “beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars,” echoing the desire that Ulysses stated in line 31 “to follow knowledge like a sinking star.” Here knowledge does not refer to learned, orderly information, but to experience. The “baths” mentioned in line 60 refers to the outer ocean which ancient people believed surrounded the earth; thus, as the stars set in the west, they would descend into the “bath” of this ocean.

Lines 62-70

The Happy Isles in line 63 refers to Elysium, also known as Elysian Fields. In Greek mythology, this was the place where the blessed went after death. According to legend, Achilles went to Elysium after being killed in the battle of Troy.

In line 67, Ulysses says of himself “that which we are, we are,” repeating the sound and spirit of his statement about Telemachus in line 43: “He works his work, I mine.” Although there are places in the poem where Ulysses seems eager to depart on another voyage, the dominant tone, as shown in these two phrases, is that he feels he is a victim of his fate, that he and the mariners who sail with him must, despite the ravages of “time and fate” (line 69), continue to experience life as fully as possible. Ulysses uses the powerful wording in the final line to encourage his men, despite circumstances that will probably overwhelm them. Although Ulysses has been seen through the years both as a quitter who cannot take society and a brave man following his fate, the tone of this last line supports Tennyson’s assertion in his Memoir that the poem is about “braving the struggle of life.”

Themes

Culture Clash

The first stanza of this poem establishes the irony of holding the honored position of ruler of a nation but being completely unimpressed, or even bothered, by it because the population is so different in temperament than the ruler. Ulysses is not displeased with his subjects, but with the entire situation: true, he calls them a “savage race,” but he uses the phrase more descriptively than judgementally and with the same acceptance in his tone that he has when he says the laws he hands down are “unequal” and that he himself is an “idle king.” What troubles Ulysses in this poem is not that his subjects are rugged, his wife is old, or that he himself is more inclined to wander than to sit still, but that all of these elements are forced together. There is nothing unusual about a ruler who is not happy with the people he controls. What is unique about Ulysses’situation is that he is aware of his own limits—while he has power to give his people commands, he cannot change them. He knows himself: he is a man of war, not of politics; he is a man who understands how to make ships follow the currents, but he cannot steer his subjects toward civility, even if he knew what it was. In his description of Telemachus, he acknowledges what the traits of a good peacetime ruler would be: “soft,” “slow,” “tender,” “centered in the sphere of common duties,” and willing to pay tribute to the lower-order gods, the ones who watch over the household. Ulysses knows that he is not the man to civilize Ithaca, and he accepts it; as he says in the 67th line, “that which we are, we are.” His personality is the exact opposite of a good peacetime leader, and he, either because of born personality or because of his twenty years of adventure, is best suited “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Topics for Further Study

Write a sequel about a famous literary figure, picking up after the end of the story that we all know. Explain how the main character feels about going home after the original action is finished.
Imagine that you are a citizen of Ithaca, and that the king, coming home after being gone for twenty years, has left again. What do you think of him? Would you be happier with Telemachus on the throne than with Ulysses? Write a letter to Ulysses, telling him how things are going at home since he left the second time.
Are there still people in the world today who feel as Ulysses felt? Where do you find them? What jobs do they have?

Growth and Development

The most obvious thing about Ulysses as he is presented in this poem is that he does not seem to believe that he can develop into a good king for Ithaca, but instead considers himself to be stuck forever with the personality he currently has. He sees that Telemachus would be a good ruler and, far from wanting to acquire that type of personality, proclaims, “He works his work, I mine.” To a degree, this attitude reveals a man who is suspicious concerning things of the mind, who believes in action, not in personal growth. He does not have the imagination to let him see himself as the type of ruler Telemachus is. Another possible interpretation is that he feels that he could be a great king, but does not feel motivated to work toward it. In calling his old crew together to sail from Ithaca, he tells them, “Some work of noble note may yet be done / Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.” There is no clear answer to whether he feels unable to develop into the leader of Ithaca or he just chooses not to.

Throughout the poem, there is evidence of Ulysses’ growth, in his constant references to what old age is like. Although he does present himself as a wanderer by nature, he also shows how his nature has been changed throughout his life, if only because each moment is making him think more and more about death. “Though much is taken, much abides,” he says in the final stanza. A few lines later he clarifies that he means physical ability was taken when he says he has been “Made weak by time and fate.” The Ulysses of this poem makes much of the fact that he and his men are the adventurous types who are not content to stay still; he mentions after the fact that they are old and near death. With these ideas he implies, but true to his character does not think much about, the fact that his ideas are developing with age into a need to keep active in order to escape death.

Politics

When we think of politics, we think of the struggle for public approval, because in a democracy the leaders are held accountable for their actions by the voting public. In a monarchy like Ithaca, though, that accountability is removed, and the business of politics can practice a more useful goal: bringing peace to society. Since the country of this poem is populated by a “savage” race, a politician’s job, as Ulysses sees it, is to “subdue them to the useful and the good.” In theory, at least, Ulysses’ travels should make him an effective politician, because he has been exposed to different sorts of governments and councils that could give him theories to apply in ruling. But he does not have the patience to transform his experiences into practice. He only hungers for more experience. In Telemachus, Ulysses sees the qualities that are needed in order to change the people from the way they are into what they should be. He is “discerning,” “blameless,” “centered,” and “decent.” In a time of war, when there is a clearly defined enemy outside of the population, these qualities might make a leader too indecisive or easy to manipulate. In governing a civilized state, a leader might not need to present such a strong moral example, but in civilizing savages, this poem tells us, a great degree of gentleness is required.

Style

This poem is written in iambic pentameter. Iambic means that the rhythm is in segments of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. Pentameter(from the Greek word “penta,” which means “five”) means that there are five of these segments—five feet—on each line. Iambic meter is the most common metric pattern used in English poetry because it resembles the natural rise and fall of the way we ordinarily speak the language. This meter is so natural that in reading a poem like “Ulysses,” which has no rhyme scheme or evenly divided stanzas to indicate that there is indeed structure, a casual reader might not notice that this poem has a metric pattern at all. The fact that this poem has a constant rhythm and the lines have the same number of syllables gives the reader a sense of the poet’s control without making the reader feel manipulated.

Because the poem lacks rhyming words at the ends of lines, its form is called blank verse. A speaker who addresses an audience in blank verse gives the impression of being individualistic, an independent thinker, not bound by convention. By contrast, a speaker whose thoughts are strictly organized around rhymes may seem to have thoughts that fit more clearly into recognized social patterns. From the subject matter of the poem, we can see that the speaker of “Ulysses” is not repeating common ideas but is saying what is deep within his heart, and this lack of decoration in his language supports that understanding.

One more technique that is prominent in this poem is the use of enjambment—the running over of a sentence or thought from one line to the next without any punctuation at the end of the line. Like the use of blank verse, this technique gives the impression that the speaker’s thoughts are not prepared for presentation to the reader, but are flowing down the page in a manner close to how they would flow through Ulysses’ mind. The lines that do come to a complete stop at the end therefore draw more attention to themselves, because of their rarity. These lines often have a caesura, or pause, in the middle, as in line 23(“To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!”), line 43(“When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.”), and line 41(“Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old”). By varying the poem’s pacing, alternating long streams with fragmented lines, Tennyson makes the structure mimic Ulysses’ thoughts, which mostly charge forward but have moments of hesitation.

Historical Context

“Ulysses” was written in late 1833, soon after Tennyson received news of the death of his dearest friend, Alfred Henry Hallam. Tennyson’s son, Hallam Tennyson, reported in a biography of Tennyson published after the author’s death that his father acknowledged the poem as an effect of his grief and said that writing the poem “gave my feeling about the need for going forward, and braving the struggle of life ...” Beyond the personal significance to the writer, “Ulysses” is a product of its times, the second bloom of the Romantic Period when it was already established as an artistic movement: a period commonly referred to as the Age of Romantic Triumph.

Because the Romantic Period was not an official organization but is a way we use of designating the spirit of the times, no strictly undisputable dates can be attached to it. This philosophical and artistic movement is generally recognized to have grown out of the social turmoil of the late 1700s—which included the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1794—and to have solidified during the Napoleonic Wars, which affected all of European society. Most critics agree with placing the starting date of the Romantic Period in 1798, when William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the groundbreaking Lyrical Ballads. There is, however, some dispute about what to consider the period’s end: some emphasize the continuation of the Romantic spirit through 1870, when novelist Charles Dickens died, while others emphasize the change in the public mood after Queen Victoria took the throne in 1837. There seems to be no reason the Romantic and Victorian periods cannot be seen to exist during the same period, depending upon what elements of a work are being examined.

The Romantic Period came about when the development of democracy and the growth of cities forced artists and philosophers to focus attention on the individual and to question the suffering that they might, in an earlier time, have been able to avoid seeing or considering. It was a time of optimism, of advancing the belief that society, whatever its problems, can be perfected. It was a time of humanism, as people came to care more about other people. It was a time when the arts came to be looked to, not only as tools of communication, but as important in and of themselves; genius and creativity were valued. In Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” making poetic expression morally equal to nature, and he revered nature. Romanticism embraced the individual and rejected the previous century’s values of harmony, balance, idealized perfection, and Classicism.

“Ulysses” has some elements of the coming Victorian attitude that eventually settled on the

Compare & Contrast

1833: Parliament passed a bill that freed slaves in all British colonies.
1865: The American Civil War ended and the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery in the United States.
1991: The apartheid system in South Africa, which segregated the country’s blacks from the whites, was abolished.
Today: Official government policies that support oppression of ethnic groups are rare, but increasingly, ethnic hostilities are the causes of wars.
1833: Oberlein College became the first U.S. college to admit women.
1920: The Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote.
1995: The Supreme Court ruled that the Citadel, a military academy accepting federal funds, must admit women.
1833: Andrew Jackson became the first president of the United States to ride a train.
1861: Abraham Lincoln’s train ride from Illinois to his inauguration in Washington D.C. was used for publicity, as it was the first time many of the voters who elected him would have a chance to see him.
Today: With air transportation, there is no need for politicians to ride trains, but many use the traditional “whistle-stop” tour as a campaign gimmick.

country (just as Tennyson eventually proved to be so favored that Queen Victoria appointed him Poet Laureate in 1850), but the poem’s influences are strictly Romantic. The early part of Romanticism, called the Age of Romantic Triumph or, sometimes, the Classical Romantic Period, was an especially vibrant time in literature, as writers fought to throw off the expectations of the generation before them, to cope with the confusion of the world, and to cope with the new-found respect that was given to artists. For example, an eighteenth-century poem or painting might depict a tale from ancient Greece that had been told before, and it might be admired for the smart handling of technique that the artist displayed. A Romantic writer, such as Sir Walter Scott, might write about the history of his own country(as in Ivanhoe), or, like Tennyson, he might use a classical situation but give the hero a new level of psychological depth.

In the 1800s, Romanticism spread across the globe, and some of the great practitioners in every field of art have either been part of the Romantic movement or, like Tennyson, have been influenced by it without following all of its principles. The names we most readily identify with Romanticism are the poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron. American authors writing at the same time who shared a similar outlook are Irving, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Poe. We also see the Romantic influence worldwide in Mary Shelley, Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Pushkin, and Dumas.

Critical Overview

“Ulysses” is generally well-regarded by critics, because of the thoughts with which it deals. The poem captures the heroic mood of the seafaring wanderer that has charmed Western civilization since the original tales of Ulysses from antiquity, but it also adds the twist of the father abandoning his responsibilities to follow the call of adventure, while leaving his son to be a sensible ruler of the land. In an 1885 review, novelist George Eliot compared “Ulysses” to Homer’s ancient work. Tennyson’s poem, she claimed, “is a pure little ingot of the same gold that runs through the ore of the Odyssey. It has the ’ large utterance’ of the early epic, with that rich fruit of moral experience which it has required thousands of years to ripen.” In a 1903 essay, another famous novelist, G. K. Chesterton, expressed his admiration for Tennyson’s overall ability to plant radical ideas into seemingly conventional works: “Underneath all of his exterior of polished and polite rectitude there was in him a genuine fire of novelty; only that, like all the able men of his period, he disguised revolution under the name of evolution.”

Concerning the way Tennyson’s ideas are expressed, however, critics have been less impressed with “Ulysses.” T. S. Eliot noted, as other critics have, that, regardless of his other gifts, Tennyson was at his weakest when trying to tell a story. “[F]or narrative Tennyson had no gift at all,” Eliot wrote in a 1936 essay. “For a static poem, and a moving poem, on the same subject, you have only to compare his ’ Ulysses’ with the condensed and intensely exciting narrative of that hero in the XXVIth Canto of Dante’s Inferno.” Although Tennyson does use his gift for describing nature to some extent in “Ulysses,” there is some dissatisfaction with the extent to which he does not. Herbert F. Tucker, in his essay “Tennyson and the Measure of Doom,” stated the commonly held opinion that “his poetic renderings of natural phenomena are rarely less than brilliant”; but, as Rhonda L. Flaxman stated in her 1987 analysis, his brilliance is underused in this particular poem: “’ Ulysses’ contains memorable flashes of visual imagery—for example, the lines ’ to follow knowledge like a sinking star’ or ’ the lights begin to twinkle from the rocks / The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep / Moans round with many voices.’ This suggestion of setting, enormously successful because so carefully selected and so rhythmically appropriate, is not allowed to flower into a fully developed description.”

Criticism

Arnold Markley

Arnold Markley is a freelance writer who has contributed essays and reviews to Approaches to Teaching D. H. Lawrence’s Fiction and The Journal of the History of Sexuality. He is currently an Assistant Professor in English at Penn State University, Media, PA. In the following essay, Markley considers how Tennyson’s use of the dramatic monologue form lends ambiguity to the poem’s meaning, leading to an ongoing debate by readers over whether this Ulysses was an aging yet honorable

What Do I Read Next?

The Odyssey of Homer is the original tale of Ulysses’ ten-year journey to return to Ithaca after the Trojan War. The translation by Robert Fitzgerald(1978) is considered the most authoritative and readable.
Douglas Bush’s Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry gives background material about how Tennyson and his peers made use of ancient verse to express their aesthetic ideals.
The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazier is one of the most influential texts in history about primitive practices and beliefs across all cultures. When Ulysses calls his people a “savage race,” this book shows what their beliefs might have been. The reader who is interested in the development of society will be fascinated by the diverse cultural beliefs represented here.
In Moby Dick, especially the early chapters, Herman Melville captures the sensibilities of men of all eras who have been drawn to a life at sea. This book was published in 1833, approximately the same time that Tennyson wrote “Ulysses.”
The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson are published in three volumes. The volume that covers Hallam’s death and the writing of this poem is Volume I: 1821-1850, which was published in 1981 and edited by Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon.

ruler or a selfish man hoping to escape his responsibilities.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” has remained one of the most popular poems of the Victorian period, and the difficulty in interpreting the poem’s ultimate message has kept critics arguing for years. The poem is a dramatic monologue, a popular poetic form in the nineteenth century in which the entire poem is narrated by a single speaker. The title of this poem indicates that the speaker is Ulysses, a legendary hero of ancient Greek literature, but Tennyson has chosen to give the speaker his Roman name rather than his Greek name, Odysseus, and this detail is important to keep in mind when interpreting the poem.

Odysseus was the hero of the ancient Greek poet Homer’s great epic poem, the Odyssey. Homer’s earlier epic, the Iliad tells the story of Achilles and the other mythological heroes of the Trojan War. After the Trojan Prince Paris abducted the legendary beauty Helen of Troy from her husband, the Greek Menelaus, the Greeks launched a ten-year war against the Trojans in an effort to win Helen back. After a long and difficult war, the Greeks finally defeated the Trojans, and the Greek warriors returned to their homes in Greece. Odysseus’s homeward journey, an arduous ten-year journey filled with many dangers, distractions, and adventures, comprises the story of the Odyssey.

One of the intriguing aspects of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is the fact that he sets his monologue years after the events of the Odyssey—after Odysseus’s many adventures on his journey, and after his long efforts to reclaim his household on the island of Ithaca. During his twenty-year absence, a host of greedy suitors had been hanging around his home, trying to convince Odysseus’s lovely wife Penelope to give up waiting for her husband to return and to marry one of them instead. Tennyson’s Ulysses is an old man, apparently addressing a group of men in an effort to raise a new crew for one final adventure at sea. The situation may have been suggested in part by the old prophet Tiresias’ mysterious prediction of Odysseus’ death in Book 11 of the Odyssey, in which he predicted that Odysseus would return home to Ithaca after many hardships, slay the suitors in his house, and finally that death would come to Odysseus in some manner from the sea, once he had become an old man.

The content of Tennyson’s poem, however, follows the great Italian poet Dante’s version of the character more than Homer’s. In fact, Tennyson’s choice of the Latinized name “Ulysses” as the poem’s title emphasizes this connection. In Canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno (one of the three parts of his great work The Divine Comedy), Dante visits the many levels of Hell and meets Ulysses, who is being punished there for his deceitfulness, a fact that also may affect one’s interpretation of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” as being less than the “ideal” hero. Ulysses tells Dante about his final voyage and describes his quest to sail beyond the prescribed limits of the world at Gibraltar, the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Dante’s Ulysses professes an attitude of persistence and tireless seeking that is much like that of Tennyson’s version of the character.

There has been much critical controversy about the character of Ulysses and his sincerity—whether or not he is meant to embody the great adventurous spirit of Homer’s Odysseus, or whether his continuing quest represents a shirking of familial responsibility and even veiled disillusionment with the life he tried so desperately to get back to throughout Homer’s Odyssey. For Ulysses describes Ithaca as a place of “barren crags,” and he disparagingly refers to his “aged wife” Penelope and to his boredom with the duties of being a king. He metes out laws to a people who sound more animalistic than human in their “hoarding, sleeping and feeding,” and who, Ulysses tells us, “know not me,” despite the fact that he tells us a few lines later that “I am become a name.”

In the third stanza, Ulysses refers to his son, Telemachus, and his statement, “This is my son” may be intended to suggest that Telemachus is standing near Ulysses and that the old man is introducing his son to the people he is addressing. Ulysses praises Telemachus’ virtues here, mentioning his “slow prudence” and the fact that he is “centred in the sphere / of common duties,” but in praising his son, he also points out a significant contrast in their personalities. “He works his work, I mine,” the old king says; a statement that has encouraged a number of critics to read a tone of irony into this “praise” of his son. In Ulysses’ description of him, Telemachus is not, after all, the kind of man Ulysses himself strives to be. Readers who are familiar with Homer may remember the great lengths to which Telemachus went in the Odyssey in both searching for his father and in protecting his father’s home from the suitors. Recalling these details may encourage the interpretation that Ulysses undervalues his son, as his brief mention of Penelope as “an aged wife” undervalues the great lengths that Penelope underwent in fending off scores of suitors and in remaining loyal to her husband in the twenty years that he was absent from Ithaca.

Tennyson began composing “Ulysses” in 1833, immediately following the shocking and sudden death of his closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. In the ten years following Hallam’s death, Tennyson worked on a grand elegy for his friend, a series of many short poems lamenting his friend’s death that he eventually published in 1850 as InMemoriam A. H. H. But Tennyson took care to point out that “Ulysses” was also inspired by the death of Hallam, and in his biography of his father, Tennyson’s son Hallam Tennyson recorded that Tennyson said, “The poem was written soon after Arthur Hallam’s death, and it gave my feeling about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam.” Tennyson again compared the poem to In Memoriam in a comment to his friend James Knowles that, “there is more about myself in ’ Ulysses,’ which was written under the sense of loss and all that had gone by but that still life must be fought out to the end. It was more written with the feeling of his loss upon me than many of the poems in In Memoriam.” Tennyson’s emphasis of this poem as an expression of his feelings concerning his friend’s death suggests that one consider whether or not there is a message in the poem concerning death and dying. Perhaps “Ulysses” is meant to be a encouraging poem, suggesting that one ought not give in to death, but instead live life to the fullest. Some readers have even interpreted Ulysses’ reference to seeing the “great Achilles” again in the afterlife as a veiled reference to Tennyson’s own hope that he would one day be reunited with his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam.

Ulysses’ rhetorical stance in dedicating himself to “drink / Life to the lees,” to “follow knowledge like a sinking star,” and “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” most frequently has been taken at face value by readers in the Victorian period, and in the twentieth century. The Victorians, particularly, saw this as a truly noble expression of a spirit tireless in the face of death and relentless in the quest for new accomplishments and discoveries. This perception of the poem’s moral is what has made it one of Tennyson’s most widely and consistently popular pieces. Nevertheless, Tennyson’s statement that the poem was written “about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life” should not be taken as a simple commendation of Ulysses’ point of view. As it was difficult to decide how to interpret Ulysses as a character, it is difficult to determine whether or not we are intended to see his will to live and his desire for adventure as honorable qualities, or rather to see that his wish for escape and for constant stimulation indicates a resistance to accept the idea of his own death. There may be another way to interpret the theme of death in the poem. Tennyson’s Ulysses does seem to be preoccupied with his own mortality in such statements as “Life piled on life / Were all too little, and of one to me / Little remains,” and in how he looks to every hour as an opportunity to evade death, saying that “every hour is saved / From that eternal silence, something more, / A bringer of new things.” Ulysses also brings up the issue of death when he says, “Death closes all: but something ere the end, / Some work of noble note, may yet be done.” Is Ulysses obsessed with dying, is he merely trying to get the most out of life, or is he looking for a final opportunity to garner a bit more fame before it is too late? Is he the great and noble hero of Homer’s epic, or the deceitful Ulysses of Dante, shirking his responsibilities to a loyal family and kingdom? The brilliance of this poem, as readers throughout the years have continued to discover, lies in its many possibilities for interpretation and in the many differing messages a reader may take from it.

Source: Arnold Markley, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1997.

Lynne B. O’ Brien

In the following excerpt, O ’ Brien considers the emotional turmoil experienced by an aging hero.

A close reading of “Ulysses” reveals contradictions and conflicts within Tennyson’s thought concerning the nature of heroism, the meaning of achievement, and the consequences to the individual and society arising from a life devoted to heroic action....

Significant critical attention has focused on the form of the poem, with critics debating whether it is a rhetorical or dramatic monologue....

By focusing on the question of categorization, the traditional criticism has overlooked the primary importance of the emotional milieu within the poem—Ulysses’sense of alienation. Whether Ulysses speaks from the shore to an actual group of men, about to embark, or whether he lies in “solitude on his deathbed” does not really matter; it is his emotional crisis which confers meaning on the poem. The impossibility of knowing the setting in which Ulysses speaks mirrors our uncertainty about his character. The ambiguity of the “truth” represents the poet’s thematic expression of the problematic nature of “heroism.” This poem asks us to consider “What is a hero?” and “What are the consequences of a life devoted to heroic action?” It is as though Tennyson designed this work to challenge readers’ perceptual biases: we expect our heroes to be pure and uncomplicated. That Ulysses violates our expectations becomes central to the poet’s elucidation of the problem inhering in our concept of heroism.

Many critics have examined the kind of knowledge which Ulysses seeks. Perhaps a more interesting question is “Why does the aged warrior continue to strive?” Ulysses is discontented because he is idle and because the “savage” people of Ithaca “know not me”...

Ulysses feels a sense of loss, emptiness, lack of use, and indifference to others. These melancholy emotions are countered by his intellect, which generates the stirring rhetoric to forge on. His current emotional state is the result of having dedicated his life to the pursuit of glory. “I am become a name,” he puns, exquisitely capturing the contradiction inherent in his celebrity. As a famous warrior he is widely known, but as a person he has been reduced to “just a name.” In the same way as he has been accused of trying to deceive his mariners into accompanying him on this last, suicidal voyage, to use them as hands to row, so too has he himself been used by Ithaca as a military tool. While the critical consensus maintains that Ulysses is abandoning his family and abdicating his governing responsibilities, he may already have been rejected by his family and country as yesterday’s hero....

Ulysses has performed a lifetime of martial duty... and if he is now unable or unequipped to embrace his civic responsibilities, perhaps that is precisely because his acquiescence in the aggressive mode has been so complete as to obliterate other dimensions of his existence, so much so that he cannot even perceive other duties. Tennyson is showing that the hero is frequently the victim of his own success, as Ulysses’ triumph in his warrior role has prevented him from moving back into the social or domestic world....

That Ulyssess is abandoning his paternal obligations we cannot be certain, as the circumstances surrounding the transfer of administrative power are unknown. Perhaps Telemachus has already been governing Ithaca for many years in his father’s absence. Perhaps Ulysses is now a superfluous figure who has already been forced out and is trying to deceive himself into thinking that he has relinquished that power which he has unwillingly lost. Perhaps his homecoming to Ithaca has been his first defeat. Far from creating the cunning figure which Dante portrayed, Tennyson may here be depicting the pathetic figure who cannot understand or accept defeat by his countrymen. The “enemy” is now within his country, and within his psyche. Tennyson may be illustrating the death-in-life of a once-revered ruler who has lost his social niche, and is consequently suffering a loss of identity, a kind of psychic injury which is more damaging than the wounds inflicted in battle.

Ulysses’ language [in the last stanza] expresses his concern with what is left of his own powers of self, and what remains for him on earth:...

Rather than await a prosaic death in Ithaca, he seeks a glorious death commensurate with his heroic self-image. He desires to guarantee his place in history by dying in his heroic element, the sea, which has been his theater of action. He seeks the immortality conferred by the endless retelling of his story, which will elevate him to an almost mythical status. He remains future-oriented, telling his mariners, “’ Tis not too late to seek a newer world,” as though this newer world were not a place, but rather a future time in history. For a man who claims that he “strove with Gods,” it seems appropriate to seek enshrinement in the collective memory. In his conviction that he has been a giant among little men, Ulysses has created his own laws. As the manipulative rhetorician his objective has been his own self-aggrandizement, which is an effort to manipulate reality to conform to his own image. In a fascinating substitution of words, Ulysses tells his mariners, that they are “Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me” when the rhyming word “fought” more accurately describes the nature of their combative work. Here Ulysses fashions an illusory cerebral component to his martial endeavors. This line also captures his nostalgia for his former power as the hero-in-charge who could create the laws or rules which others passively followed.

Is Ulysses trying to deceive an actual group of mariners into accompanying him, or is he trying to hide from the truth of his frail, powerless, human identity? The “historical crisis” of the monologue seems to be that for the first time he is confronted with the illusory nature of his lifelong self-identification as a “hero.” He continues to strive(if only in his mind) because he knows nothing else. His worldly “knowledge” derived from years of adventure is no substitute for the self-knowledge and spiritual capabilities which he lacks. His tragedy is that he is confronted with the emptiness of his achievement. He is aware that the goal which he has pursued in life—glory—has fallen far short of the preconceived ideas which he absorbed from his culture.

This hero who hopes to achieve immortality through an incorporation into the collective memory had his origins in a cultural creation process. Ulysses strove to become the supreme fighter, because the ability to triumph in battle was prized by his culture and was how maleness was defined....

Ulysses did not at a given moment in his history suddenly renounce a life of spiritual harmony for glory. His development as a warrior was impelled by those cultural forces which dictated male behavior. The young boy models himself on those vaunted figures celebrated by society. Society is the mirror by which the young man comes to “see” or to know himself. Ulysses’ voyage has taken him from celebrity to encroaching obscurity as he can now no longer “see” himself in that social mirror—that “savage race” no longer knows him. Tennyson is suggesting the danger inherent in the reductive merging of the individual with his achievement. Ulysses can only define himself as a warrior. His self-definition hinges on his achievements. Tennyson may be questioning the validity of his country’s materialistic values by creating the Ithacan hero as a nebulous figure who, in his symbolization as the apex of achievement, casts into doubt those societal values which helped to shape that achievement. Paradoxically, it is Ulysses’ act of resistance against his society which preserves his individuality....

Source: Lynne B. O’ Brien, “Male Heroism: Tennyson’s Divided View,” in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer, 1994, pp. 171–176.

Charles Mitchell

In the following excerpt, Mitchell examines Ulysses’ “conflict between his will and death.”

Past criticism of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” has tended to view Ulysses’ tension as that between “the ’ romantic’ withdrawing, passive Tennyson, and the ’ classical’ outgoing, active Tennyson.” However, I feel that Ulysses’ major tension is of a different kind, fixed in the outer conflict between his will and death. The poem commences just as the inner tension between Ulysses’ duty to country and higher obligation to himself is being resolved. The new, outer conflict, between Ulysses’ will and death, frames the new inner tension of his uncertainty about whether spiritual reality exists in death: although Ulysses’ will seems certain of the existence of spiritual reality, his mind seems unsure of it. Ulysses’ assertion of will in the last line resolves both the inner and outer tensions about death: after his mind has arrived at some certainty by examining the past performance of his will, his will, reassured by his mind, asserts the presence of spiritual reality in the future. The voyage for which Ulysses is preparing is the act of dying, and his

“The ambiguity of the ’ truth’ represents the poet’s thematic expression of the problematic nature of ’ heroism.’ This poem asks us to consider ’ What is a hero?’”

goal is spiritual reality. Time seems destructive of all value in the world, including his own physical nature, but Ulysses asserts that his will will not yield to the culmination of time’s opposition—death.

When the question of the form of “Ulysses” has been considered, it has generally been assumed that the poem is formally a dramatic monologue. However, that assumption is not easily established, for the disclosure that Ulysses faces an audience comes gradually and belatedly. The first section(11. 1-32) might well be soliloquy since there Ulysses seems to be generalizing about himself in private; the second section(11. 33-43) seems to address someone while pointing to Telemachus; only late in the poem, in the third section(11. 44-70), is an audience designated. Since we become aware of the transition from self address to public address tardily, we cannot easily determine whether the poem is entirely a dramatic monologue, or part soliloquy and part dramatic monologue, or perhaps soliloquy in the guise of dramatic monologue. Although most past criticism has categorized the poem as dramatic monologue, some recent criticism has argued that the first thirty-two lines present a soliloquy. However, it seems likely that the whole poem is a soliloquy presented as a dramatic monologue. That is, the progress of what seems to be the literal occasion may exist only in the mind of the speaker as a metaphor for an inward voyage which he contemplates. “By this still hearth” fixes Ulysses’situation. Then the sequence of his thoughts develops out of his contemplation of the past(11. 1-32) into a formal farewell, perhaps to his subjects while still on shore(11. 33—43), goes on to the speech to his mariners on board the ship(11. 44-56), then to his embarkation(11.56-61), and ends on the anticipated voyage(11.62-70). The transitions from one position, and audience, to the next, however, are not filled in; the fact that a jump from one to another(especially in 1. 32 to 1. 33 and in 1. 43 to 1 4) is made suggests that the occasion takes place in Ulysses’ mind.... We do not perceive the scene directly through the mind of the speaker so much as we view it in his mind. That the poem is not clearly a dramatic monologue coincides with the fact that it is not concerned with the immediacies of social issues. Instead of voicing a desire to escape social responsibility, the poem presents more universal intellectual issues and hence the soliloquy form seems more suited to the private contemplation of such issues. Since that private contemplation requires action to confirm belief, the speaker presents what is soliloquy in the form of dramatic address which implies action. The dramatic stage, then, is an illusion contrived 1) to establish the vital connection between the outer world of action and the inner world of contemplation and 2) to establish the symbolic connection between the two whereby action in the seen world(the embarkation on a sea voyage) is symbolic of action in the unseen world.

The issues in the poem become clear only with an understanding of the goal Ulysses seeks. Whereas in the first paragraph Ulysses implies that in the past he has explored the known world, in the last paragraph, which deals with the future, he goes to “seek a newer world.” He also describes that goal as an “untravelled world,” one which only gleams through the travelled world and one which can never be reached in the world of time since its “margin fades / For ever and for ever when I move.” That this world is a realm of pure spiritual being found on the other side of death is clear from the fact that Ulysses hopes to find the deceased Achilles there. The direction of the journey further clarifies that his goal is in death:

for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

Here the westerly direction and the setting of the sun, the emblem of temporal life, make it clear that the goal is in death; and the concluding clause associates this last voyage with Ulysses’ own death. However, one needs to emphasize that Ulysses’ goal is not death, but is in death: that is, Ulysses seeks not death, but life in death....

The sea voyage is a traditional symbol of the spiritual journey, including the act of dying.... That the sea voyage is a means of figuring Ulysses’ own death is indicated by what has already been said and is established further by the details of the occasion: “The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs.” Ulysses’ voyage and his death are identified by the nightfall—the occasion when the sun sets and the moon rises, when the body dies and the soul endures: “Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will.” The literal details of the occasion also suggest that Ulysses is preparing for death. For one thing, he is near death:

Life piled on life
Were all to little, and of one to me
Little remains.

In addition, the fact that he now relinquishes the rule of Ithaca to Telemachus with decided finality is appropriate to preparation for death and suggests that he intends a voyage from which he will not return:

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle—
...........
When I am gone.

Ulysses’ reference to himself as spirit and to his shipmates as souls further enforces the suggestion that he intends to seek a spiritual realm by dying:

And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

The phrase “like a sinking star” would seem to modify the verb “follows” since Ulysses can pursue ultimate knowledge only by dying. To the mariners he says,

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought
       with me.

The mariners are not common sailors, but are souls who are prepared to go on a mental or spiritual voyage, doing more than tend to the rigging. Like death, the sea is dark and broad, mysterious and limitless. The star sinking into the sea mirrors the spirit plunging into the destructive element, an act prefigured in the past when

Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea.

If this image corresponds with Ulysses’ later reference to himself and his mariners as “men that strove with Gods,” including Poseidon, the implication would be that sinking into the sea now is similar to striving with the gods in the past.

The problem for the mind of the yet-living Ulysses is to determine that there is evidence for the existence of spiritual reality. His mind seems unsure about the future because it does not know whether death contains complete annihilation or offers spiritual fulfillment, the two alternatives which Ulysses considers:

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles.

The past, however, seems to support the latter alternative because Ulysses’ past actions suggested that a spiritual reality impinged upon finite existence:

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams the untravelled world.

Hence whereas the mind views the two possibilities for death as exclusive alternatives, the imaginative will perceives them as a single event. Since Ulysses’ mind cannot posit the absolute truth of its desired conclusion, it must maintain a logical scepticism even to the end. Ulysses’ will, however, has to contravert logic and assert the continuance of itself in death even before he has died. The immediate difficulty is that the connection between the vital past and the desired vital future is severed by the present, which is a barren existence devoid of spiritual vitality.

The forces which seem to disprove the existence of spirit are time, fate (1. 69) and the weakness of human nature. The goal of Ulysses’ future quest is infinite, but the goal of his past quest was finite: wife and country. Penelope has not remained an unchanging goal, but rather time has made her an “aged wife.” Perhaps Ulysses considers it fate that he who could not rest from travel must become static in administering laws to a people who are not improved by his efforts. He feels that he is an “idle king” not because he is idle (he does “mete and dole”), but because his people are idle. Ulysses feels that his fruitless activity as ruler is stasis for him(“How dull it is to pause”) but that it may be accelerated in his son to “slow prudence,” the people gradually becoming “rugged” instead of “savage.” Because Ithaca is finite, it is not the unlimited goal toward which Ulysses needs to direct his will if it is to remain active....

As Ulysses perceives it in his subjects, who represent the majority of mankind(in contrast to the minority, his mariners), human nature seems to disprove the existence of spirit in man, for instead of exercising the active will of individual spirit, they perform only bestial functions: “a savage race, / That hoard, and sleep, and feed.” From Ulysses’superior standpoint, such life is really death(“As though to breathe were life!”) and the death he seeks is life.

“The voyage for which Ulysses is preparing is the act of dying, and his goal is spiritual reality.”

Ulysses’ evidence that spiritual reality may exist is himself. His unexpressed argument seems to be that if one can prove in life that man is spirit, one has a right to hope that man remains spirit in death. This underlying assumption of the poem is implied by the fact that Ulysses hopes to see Achilles in the Happy Isles. Ulysses emphasizes his difference from, and superiority to, his subjects because their natures would seem to indicate that man is spiritless. Many readers have thought that the sentiments which Ulysses expresses in the first paragraph indicate his self-pride: “know not me,” “I have suffered greatly,” “I am become a name,” “Much have I seen and known,” “Myself not least, but honoured of them all.” But when one sets these statements and Ulysses’ description of himself over against his description of his subjects, one realizes that Ulysses’ remarks about himself have a much larger purpose than to reveal his vanity at the moment of death, for greater issues are at stake than the pluming of pride. Ulysses is trying less to inflate himself than to convince himself that he is proof of his own immortality since his experience has proved him to be supra-animal.

Ulysses persuades himself that he is more than a body. Whereas his subjects merely sleep and feed, he is awake both literally and imaginatively. He has “seen and known” much, including “Gleams [of] that untravelled world”; moreover, whereas his subjects sleep, he is awake for action this night because he “cannot rest from travel.” And whereas they merely feed their bodies, he nourishes his spirit:

I will drink
Life to the lees.
..........
For always roaming with a hungry heart
..........
And drunk delight of battle with my peers.

Hence, Ulysses’ reflection that his subjects “know not me” may express less a proud disdain or self-pity than a regret that they do not heed his efforts to guide them or do not attend what he, as their spiritual exemplar, represents: he has “become a name,” that is, become for all mankind(“cities of men / And manners, climates, councils, governments”) the lasting symbol of the “heroic heart.” Although in the present his subjects do not honor him, and thereby seem to negate what Ulysses is trying to prove to himself, those he has known in the past did recognize his worth: “Myself not least, but honoured of them all.”

By recognizing him in the past, his “peers” have confirmed what Ulysses has learned about himself, that he possesses spirit:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world.

Closely connected are Ulysses’spirit, the spiritual reality of the untravelled world, and his past experience. The untravelled world “gleams” and Ulysses “shine[s]”: the nature of that other world and the nature of Ulysses are linked through his active experience. He is all that he has met, for his experience has discovered to him his unstoppable will: “All times have I enjoyed / Greatly, have suffered greatly.” He and his men manifest their superiority of spiritual will by responding joyfully not only to happy, but also to trying, occasions:

ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads.

Experience proves the spirit in the man, and man thereby proves the spiritual world outside himself. Ulysses’ remark in the last paragraph is in keeping with his previous expostulations which seemed to smack of vanity:

Some work of noble note, may yet be done
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The subjunctive verb and the double negative of the participial construction, as well as the preceding admission that “you and I are old,” indicate that the statement does not express mere vanity but is Ulysses’ attempt to fortify himself and his men for the future with the memory of their past. The implication is that men who strove with gods may be godlike. In the past they apparently could perform like gods, possessing “that strength which in the old days moved heaven and earth.”

The past seems to mirror the future, but the present stands between the mirror and the reality. Opposed to Ulysses’ will and imagination(identified respectively with “Free hearts, free foreheads”) is the bestiality of his subjects, which does not permit him to exercise more than the rational side of his mind(“slow prudence”) in governing them. The practice of “the useful and the good” is admirable, but these are “in the sphere / Of common duties”: they reveal man’s practical and moral nature, but not his spiritual nature. Thus Ulysses leaves behind the lesser duties to his son, while he presses forward beyond the limits of the rational mind(“Beyond the utmost bound of human thought”) in an attempt to prove that man is spirit. Past is freed from present to unite with the future.

The symbolic sea voyage of dying seems contradicted by the literal sea voyage, which is to be completed “ere the end.” The repeated urgency to undergo a new voyage before death occurs(“Death closes all”) tends to distract us from realizing that the literal voyage is also a metaphor for the literal event of dying. The great energy with which Ulysses and his men rush toward their goal does not suggest that they are dying: “Push off and well in order smite the sounding furrows.” The strength, however, is not physical, but volitional: “We are not now that strength,” but “that which we are, we are—... strong in will.” The symbolic voyage, which is to take place just on the other side of death, is presented as a literal voyage, which is to take place on this side of death. The area where literal and symbolic voyages overlap marks the place where past and future merge: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” The first two verbs mark the past and are balanced by the second two verbs, which mark the future; that is, the verbs are related as a:b::b:a. The two pairs are divided by death but are joined by the undying will, which never yields: not to opposition in the past, stasis in the present, or death in the future. The body dies, but the will remains constant through both life and death. The man who experiences greatly will find at last the great Achilles. Achilles and Ulysses have an “equal temper of heroic hearts”: as peer, Achilles is what Ulysses was and will be.

Source: Charles Mitchell, ’ The Undying Will of Tennyson’s Ulysses,” in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 2, December, 1964 pp. 87–95.

Sources

Chesterton, G. K., “Tennyson,” in Varied Types, Dodd, Mead and Co., 1903, pp. 249-57.

Eliot, George. “Belles Lettres,” The Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, Vol. LXIV, No. CXXVI, October, 1855, pp. 596-615.

Eliot, T. S., “In Memoriam,” in Essays Ancient & Modern, Faber & Faber Limited, 1936, pp. 175-90.

Flaxman, Rhonda L., “Tennyson,” in Victorian Word-Painting and Narrative: Toward the Blending of Genders, UMI Research Press, 1983, pp. 73-124.

Ricks, Christopher B., ed. The Poems of Tennyson. 3 vols. Essex: Longman, 1987.

Tennyson, Hallam. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1897, 1906.

Tucker, Herbert F., “Tennyson and the Measure of Doom,” PMLA, Volume 98, No. 1, January 1983, pp. 8-20.

For Further Study

Killham, John, “Tennyson and Victorian Social Values,” Tennyson, edited by D. J. Palmer, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. 1973, pp. 147-179.

The author argues convincingly that the sensibilities that formed this poem fit more closely with social attitudes prevailing twenty years later. This work is more focused on the era of Tennyson’s greatest recognition, notably the 1850s on, than about the early poems, but it gives a good sense of Tennyson the man.

Kissane, James, Alfred Tennyson, New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1970.

Kissane’s analysis of the poems is very involved and clear: he looks at Tennyson’s works as poems, not as pieces of history, and writes about them in a way that is easy to understand. This book is a good start for the reader who wants to understand Tennyson as a craftsman.

Ricks, Christopher, Tennyson, New York: The MacMillian Company, 1972.

This author gives a detailed background of Tennyson’s life and career around the time that “Ulysses” was written, intertwining literary themes with background information.

Poetry for Students