"Ulysses" is a poem in blank verse by the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, written in 1833 when Tennyson was 24 and published in 1842 in his well-received second volume of poetry. An oft-quoted poem, it is a popular example of the dramatic monologue. Facing old age, mythical hero Ulysses describes his discontent and restlessness upon returning to his kingdom, Ithaca, after his far-ranging travels. Despite his reunion with his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus, Ulysses yearns to explore again.
The Ulysses character (in Greek, Odysseus) has been widely examined in literature. His adventures were first recorded in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (c. 800–700 BC), and Tennyson draws on Homer's narrative in the poem. Most critics, however, find that Tennyson's Ulysses recalls Dante's Ulisse in his Inferno (c. 1320). In Dante's re-telling, Ulisse is condemned to hell among the false counsellors, both for his pursuit of knowledge beyond human bounds and for creating the deception of the Trojan horse.
For much of this poem's history, readers viewed Ulysses as resolute and heroic, admiring him for his determination "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield". The view that Tennyson intended a heroic character is supported by his statements about the poem, and by the events in his life—the death of his closest friend—that prompted him to write it. In the twentieth century, some new interpretations of "Ulysses" highlighted potential ironies in the poem. They argued, for example, that Ulysses wishes to selfishly abandon his kingdom and family, and they questioned more positive assessments of Ulysses' character by demonstrating how he resembles flawed protagonists in earlier literature.
Synopsis and structure As the poem begins, Ulysses has returned to his kingdom, Ithaca, having made a long journey home after fighting in the Trojan War. Confronted again by domestic life, Ulysses expresses his lack of contentment, including his indifference toward the "savage race" (line 4) whom he governs. Ulysses contrasts his present restlessness with his heroic past, and contemplates his old age and eventual death—"Life piled on life / Were all too little, and of one to me / Little remains" (24–26)—and longs for further experience and knowledge. His son Telemachus will inherit the throne that Ulysses finds burdensome. While Ulysses thinks that Telemachus will be a good king—"Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere / Of common duties" (39)—he seems to have lost any connection to his son—"He works his work, I mine" (43)—and the conventional methods of governing—"by slow prudence" and "through soft degrees" (36, 37). In the final section, Ulysses turns to his fellow mariners and calls on them to join him on another quest, making no guarantees as to their fate but attempting to conjure their heroic past:
... 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. (56–64)
Prosody
The speaker's language is unelaborated but forceful, and it expresses Ulysses' conflicting moods as he searches for continuity between his past and future. There is often a marked contrast between the sentiment of Ulysses' words and the sounds that express them. For example, the poem's insistent iambic pentameter is often interrupted by spondees (metrical feet that consist of two long syllables); such laboured language slows the poem (and in other places may cast doubt upon the reliability of Ulysses' utterances):
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. (19–21)
Observing their burdensome prosodic effect, the poet Matthew Arnold remarked, "these three lines by themselves take up nearly as much time as a whole book of the Iliad."Quoted in . Many of the poem's clauses carry over into the following line; these enjambments emphasize Ulysses' restlessness and dissatisfaction.
Form
The poem's seventy lines of blank verse are presented as a dramatic monologue. Scholars disagree on how Ulysses' speech functions in this format; it is not necessarily clear to whom Ulysses is speaking, if anyone, and from what location. Some see the verse turning from a soliloquy to a public address, as Ulysses seems to speak to himself in the first movement, then to turn to an audience as he introduces his son, and then to relocate to the seashore where he addresses his mariners. In this interpretation, the comparatively direct and honest language of the first movement is set against the more politically minded tone of the last two movements. For example, the second paragraph (33–43) about Telemachus, in which Ulysses muses again about domestic life, is a "revised version [of lines 1–5] for public consumption": a "savage race" is revised to a "rugged people".
The ironic interpretations of "Ulysses" may be the result of the modern tendency to consider the narrator of a dramatic monologue as necessarily "unreliable". According to critic Dwight Culler, the poem has been a victim of revisionist readings in which the reader expects to reconstruct the truth from a misleading narrator's accidental revelations. Culler himself views "Ulysses" as a dialectic in which the speaker weighs the virtues of a contemplative and an active approach to life; Ulysses moves through four emotional stages that are self-revelatory, not ironic: beginning with his rejection of the barren life to which he has returned in Ithaca, he then fondly recalls his heroic past, recognizes the validity of Telemachus' method of governing, and with these thoughts plans another journey.
Publication history
Tennyson completed the poem on 20 October 1833, but it was not published until 1842, in his second collection of Poems. Unlike many of Tennyson's other important poems, "Ulysses" was not revised after its publication.
Tennyson originally blocked out the poem in four paragraphs, broken before lines 6, 33 and 44. In this structure, the first and third paragraphs are thematically parallel, but may be read as interior and exterior monologues, respectively. However, the poem is often printed with the first paragraph break omitted.
Interpretations
Autobiographical elements
Tennyson penned "Ulysses" after the death of his close Cambridge friend, the poet Arthur Henry Hallam, with whom Tennyson had a strong emotional bond. The two friends had spent much time discussing poetry and philosophy, writing verse, and travelling in southern France, the Pyrenees, and Germany. Tennyson considered Hallam destined for greatness, perhaps as a statesman.
When Tennyson heard on 1 October 1833 of his friend's death, he was living in Somersby, Lincolnshire, in cramped quarters with his mother and nine of his ten siblings. His father had died in 1831, requiring Tennyson to return home and take responsibility for the family. Tennyson's friends were becoming increasingly concerned about his mental and physical health during this time. The family had little income, and three of Tennyson's brothers were mentally ill. Just as Tennyson's outlook was improving—he was adjusting to his new domestic duties, regaining contact with friends, and had published his 1832 book of poems—the news of Hallam's death arrived. Tennyson shared his grief with his sister, Emily, who had been engaged to Hallam.
According to Victorian scholar Linda Hughes, the emotional gulf between the state of his domestic affairs and the loss of his special friendship informs the reading of "Ulysses"—particularly its treatment of domesticity. At one moment, Ulysses' discontent seems to mirror that of Tennyson, who would have been frustrated with managing the house in such a state of grief. At the next, Ulysses is determined to transcend his age and his environment by travelling again. It may be that Ulysses' determination to defy circumstance attracted Tennyson to the myth; he said that the poem "gave my feeling about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life".Widely quoted; see for example . On another occasion, the poet stated, "There is more about myself in Ulysses, which was written under the sense of loss and that all 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 poems in In Memoriam."Quoted in . Hallam's death influenced much of Tennyson's poetry, including perhaps his most highly regarded work, In Memoriam A.H.H., begun in 1833 and completed seventeen years later.
Other critics find stylistic incongruities between the poem and its author that make "Ulysses" exceptional. W. W. Robson writes, "Tennyson, the responsible social being, the admirably serious and 'committed' individual, is uttering strenuous sentiments in the accent of Tennyson the most un-strenuous, lonely and poignant of poets." He finds that Tennyson's two widely noted personae, the "responsible social being" and the melancholic poet, meet uniquely in "Ulysses", yet seem not to recognize each other within the text.
Literary context
Tennyson adopts aspects of the Ulysses character and narrative from many sources; his treatment of Ulysses is the first modern account. The ancient Greek poet Homer introduced Ulysses (Odysseus in GreekThe word "Ulysses" (more correctly "Ulixes") is the Latin form of the Greek "Odysseus", source of the word "odyssey".), and many later poets took up the character, including Euripides,Tennyson wrote in the margin of Euripides' Hecabe, "Ulysses is, as usual, crafty [and] unfeeling" (). Horace, Dante, William Shakespeare, and Alexander Pope. Homer's Odyssey provides the poem's narrative background: in its eleventh book the prophet Tiresias foretells that Ulysses will return to Ithaca after a difficult voyage, then begin a new, mysterious voyage, and later die a peaceful, "unwarlike" death that comes vaguely "far from the sea". At the conclusion of Tennyson's poem, his Ulysses is contemplating undertaking this new voyage.
Tennyson's character, however, is not the lover of public affairs seen in Homer's poems. Rather, "Ulisse" from Dante's Inferno is Tennyson's main source for the character, which has an important effect on the poem's interpretation. Ulisse recalls his voyage in the Infernos 26th canto, in which he is condemned to the Eighth Circle of false counsellors for misusing his gift of reason. Dante treats Ulisse, with his "zeal …/ T'explore the world", as an evil counsellor who lusts for adventure at the expense of his family and his duties in Ithaca. Tennyson projects this zeal into Ulysses' unquenched desire for knowledge:
And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. (30–32)
The poet's intention to recall the Homeric character remains evident in certain passages. "I am become a name" (11) recalls an episode in the Odyssey in which Demodocus sings about Odysseus' adventures in the king's presence, acknowledging his fame. With phrases such as "There gloom the dark broad seas" (45) and "The deep / Moans round with many voices" (55–56), Tennyson seems to be consciously invoking Homer.
Critics have also noted the influence of Shakespeare in two passages. In the early movement, the savage race "That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me" (5) echoes Hamlet's soliloquy: "What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more."IV, iv. 32 ff., quoted in Tennyson's "How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!" (22–23) recalls Shakespeare's Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602):Troilus and Cressida, Act III, Scene III, quoted in . perseverance, my dear lord,