Alfred Tennyson and A Summary of Ulysses
Alfred Tennyson and A Summary of Ulysses
Alfred Tennyson and A Summary of Ulysses
Abdicates responsibility.
Lines 1 - 5
The opening two lines and a half suggest that the speaker
is observing an idle king and it's only when the rest of line
three is read that the first person is revealed. This is
Ulysses himself, bemoaning the fact that he's stuck at
home.
Just look at the language...little profit, idle, still, barren,
agèd. Words that imply emptiness and stagnation. (note
the accent on the è in agèd making this a two syllable
word which fits into the pentameter)
Lines 6 - 17
Lines 18 - 21
Lines 22 - 23
Lines 24 - 32
Lines 33 - 43
Lines 44 - 61
We are what we are Ulysses says, that is, older now but
still full of yearning for new things. He will never give in.
Alliteration
Words in lines that are close together, either full or slant rhymed, bringing
echo and connection:
mete/sleep/feed/lees...me/rainy/sea...port/wrought/thought...
Metaphor
Form
This poem is written as a dramatic monologue: the entire poem
is spoken by a single character, whose identity is revealed by his
own words. The lines are in blank verse, or unrhymed iambic
pentameter, which serves to impart a fluid and natural quality to
Ulysses’s speech. Many of the lines are enjambed, which means
that a thought does not end with the line-break; the sentences
often end in the middle, rather than the end, of the lines. The use
of enjambment is appropriate in a poem about pushing forward
“beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” Finally, the poem
is divided into four paragraph-like sections, each of which
comprises a distinct thematic unit of the poem.
Commentary
In this poem, written in 1833 and revised for publication in
1842, Tennyson reworks the figure of Ulysses by drawing on
the ancient hero of Homer’s Odyssey (“Ulysses” is the Roman
form of the Greek “Odysseus”) and the medieval hero of
Dante’s Inferno. Homer’s Ulysses, as described in Scroll XI of
the Odyssey, learns from a prophecy that he will take a final sea
voyage after killing the suitors of his wife Penelope. The details
of this sea voyage are described by Dante in Canto XXVI of
the Inferno: Ulysses finds himself restless in Ithaca and driven
by “the longing I had to gain experience of the world.” Dante’s
Ulysses is a tragic figure who dies while sailing too far in an
insatiable thirst for knowledge. Tennyson combines these two
accounts by having Ulysses make his speech shortly after
returning to Ithaca and resuming his administrative
responsibilities, and shortly before embarking on his final
voyage.
However, this poem also concerns the poet’s own personal
journey, for it was composed in the first few weeks after
Tennyson learned of the death of his dear college friend Arthur
Henry Hallam in 1833. Like In Memoriam, then, this poem is
also an elegy for a deeply cherished friend. Ulysses, who
symbolizes the grieving poet, proclaims his resolution to push
onward in spite of the awareness that “death closes all” (line
51). As Tennyson himself stated, the poem expresses his own
“need of going forward and braving the struggle of life” after
the loss of his beloved Hallam.
The poem’s final line, “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to
yield,” came to serve as a motto for the poet’s Victorian
contemporaries: the poem’s hero longs to flee the tedium of
daily life “among these barren crags” (line 2) and to enter a
mythical dimension “beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the
western stars” (lines 60–61); as such, he was a model of
individual self-assertion and the Romantic rebellion against
bourgeois conformity. Thus for Tennyson’s immediate
audience, the figure of Ulysses held not only mythological
meaning, but stood as an important contemporary cultural icon
as well.