Alfred Tennyson’s “Ulysses”
Over half a year ago, I began writing about a great poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I fiddled with the letter, revising, making sure the typography would work in a letter sent by email. I felt the unsent letter hanging over me; meanwhile, I composed another letter, soon to come, on poetry, anchored in an excerpt from William Carlos Williams; and still another (in process) on a poem by Matthew Arnold.
Then I, as millions of others, saw ‘the movie of the year,’ The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan. Something about the last scene (spoiler alert) when Odysseus sails off with Penelope, leaving Ithaka behind, tugged at my brain. I went back to The Odyssey, rereading the final four books. Amazing. The movie got the ‘Odysseus slaughters the suitors’ scene exactly right: Lots of bloodshed, Odysseus heroic, Telemachus his sidekick. And the following scene, where Odysseus beds Penelope, was in The Odyssey. But then? Following the lovemaking with his wife, in Homer’s poem there is another reunification, where Odysseus ventures outside of Ithaka to meet with his father. Hmmm. That was not in the movie. As the poem ends, Odysseus and his father are girding to battle the relations and friends of the slaughtered suitors: Suddenly, the gods intervene and say “Enough with all this killing,’ and the poem ends. Instead of this final reunification and the threat of yet more battle and slaughter, in the film Odysseus (along with his wife) embarks on a voyage on the sea. Newly returned from his decade-long journey over the wine-dark seas, he sets sail again. So ends the movie.
So where did this sailing off into the future come from? Not Homer. (For that matter, the Trojan Horse is not in The Odyssey either, but comes from Virgil’s Aeneid.) The end of the movie is pure Tennyson. And thus the poem – which in the letter which follows I propose inspired Baudelaire (I think), and Melville (I think), and T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas – also inspired Christopher Nolan and his movie.
Odysseus voyages onward, onward. That is not Homer. That is Tennyson.
This makes Tennyson’s ‘take’ on Odysseus a central text in Western literature, one of the foundational poems of our modernity. We think of Tennyson as a ‘Victorian’ writer, very much of the nineteenth century and not our own. (Tennyson lived a long life, 1809-1892, all of it in that century). But, in enormously powerful ways, he and his remarkable poem still shape our own times!
[By the way, I went to the movie prepared to push back against Emily Wilson, who translated The Odyssey and panned the film. Her review, in The London Review of Books, was – as they say in England –‘spot on.’ And she too recognized that the film’s ending came from Tennyson, not Homer….]
Ulysses
Alfred Lord Tennyson
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd 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 enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext 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 honour'd 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 wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' 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 the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred 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 toil'd, 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 honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble 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,
'T is 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;
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.
In 1833 Alfred Tennyson wrote a poem, “Ulysses.” It is usually considered the first dramatic monologue. What is a dramatic monologue? It is when a lyric poet, rather than writing in the first person about himself or herself, writes in the voice of a ‘character’ who says – or thinks, and renders into saying – what is on his or her mind. The usual presumption of the lyric poem, that the speaker is the self who is writing the poem, is put aside in order to explore the complexities of a character who reveals the character’s ‘self’ though the words he or she chooses to speak. By the middle and end of the century, especially in the hands of Robert Browning, the dramatic monologue became a major mode in lyric poetry.
But there is a great difference between this poem and the dramatic monologues of Browning which were to follow. Robert Browning chose to explore what John Keats, in one of his letters, termed “negative capability,” the capacity to exist in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without an irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In other words, to be a person who is not easily explainable but who, nonetheless, exists. Browning ventured into exploring the minds and feelings of others. He was fascinated by the notion that there were other people in the world (and history) who did not resemble himself, who did not operate by the laws which governed his own sense of coherence. These people were strangers. He decided to explore that strangeness, that (big word coming!) otherness. Browning populated his world not with extensions of himself but with people who thought, felt, acted, differently than he did. (Tennyson, as we shall see in “Ulysses,” was not activated by a need to comprehend, or reproduce in words, an older man who was confronting the dilemmas of aging and time.)
The dramatic monologue continued into the twentieth century as a major vessel for poetry. One needs only to think of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Gerontion,” or of Yeats’s ‘Crazy Jane’ poems, or of the older woman in Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” (Although I would contend that Eliot and Yeats like Tennyson, used the device of ‘the other’ to explore themselves, at a remove so that they could not as easily be recognized as uncourageous [Eliot] or sex-mad [Yeats]).
Why did Alfred Tennyson take on the character of Odysseus, Ulysses in Latin, instead of writing about himself? Let’s look at the historical context. In late 1833, Tennyson’s closest friend, Arthur Hallam, died, and the poet was not only bereft but distraught. It is not hard, I think, to imagine that Tennyson projected his own quandary – how do I go on, after so much of what life seemed to hold is over and done with for me? – onto a character. That the character he wrote about is aged and still aging, while Tennyson himself was beginning the prime of life (he was 2twenty-four), meant that the poet could address his own situation without seeming to address it, could put onto an elderly man the questions that vexed him even before he reached middle age. For Ulysses is old. With many of his life’s journeys and adventures over, he faces two questions, ‘What next?’ and: ‘How do I endure and even move forward?’ Tennyson, the poet and imaginer of Ulysses, is not old, not old at all. He is twenty-four. Tennyson faces those questions in this poem, with the whole of life, rather than its dregs, ahead of him.
To most readers, the poem seems to be about old age, and that is how I have read it in the past. But the more I re-read the poem now, as I myself am older, the more I think it is Tennyson using Ulysses to address himself and his youthful crisis. It is not, I now think, about old age and facing the ultimate, death. It is about choosing to persevere and go forward at the cusp between youth and early middle age, after a severe setback. The famous last line, stirring still, is about a man of twenty-four and not an elderly man: “strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” The poem is Tennyson’s exhortation to himself to follow Ulysses’ example to keep going, to move into the future, striving, seeking, and not yielding to loss and despair.
It is, in other words, a young man’s poem, as he puts his own needs and wants into the thoughts of an elderly man.
Let’s look at the Ulysses who reveals himself in this poem, which is in three parts, all written in blank verse (iambic pentameter, five beats to a line, ten syllables, alternating between unstressed and stressed syllables).
In the first part (stanza one,) as the poem begins, Ulysses presents himself as an “idle king.” Consider the descriptions the poet provides us: no ‘profit,’ a “still” hearth without fire, crags which are “barren,” an “aged wife.” Ulysses no longer acts, but merely dispenses: “I mete and dole.” Those he rules are a “savage race” who “hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.” They have their own needs, both for accumulating whatever they can, and for maintaining life. Estranged from the struggle of daily life, Ulysses does not want to surrender to what still lies before him: Diminished capacity and ultimately, death.
In this situation, of course Ulysses needs to escape, saying “I cannot rest from travel, I will drink life to the lees.” Those are wonderful and bold words. Onward he says, let me drink what life remains to the very bottom of its vessel. Who, as reader, would not want to get whatever he or she can from the life that has been given to the self?
Ulysses was once a great hero, enjoying and suffering, together with others or alone: “Much have I seen or done.” (In Western culture, he is the very model of the questing hero, always journeying, always seeking, always ready to take on whatever he encounters on his journey.) And he has had ‘honours,’ ‘delights.’ He’s become famous for his feats, world-renowned. He’s entered the history books: “I have become a name.” Now, in older age, he who was “a part of all that I have met,” who has been woven into the fabric of the world, realizes that prior experience is only a prologue to the adventures that await. There is more, Ulysses recognizes, yet to come. Life is not over, as Yogi Berra might have said, until it is over.
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
In the monologue, this recognition that experience always beckons us onward is followed by his current complaint: “How dull it is to pause, to make an end.” He renders this acceptance of ending in an unforgettable metaphor: “To rust unburnish’d, not to shine with use.” His life is a sword, and in his idleness (recall that first line, where he announces he is “an idle king”), he rusts: The shine has disappeared. Only through use, only through the brandishing and thrust and parry and engagement of the sword that is his life, can that sword once again “shine.” An active sword shines; an inactive sword, sheathed in its scabbard, is unhappily “unburnish’d.”
Oh, Ulysses has had enough of a life which, in Shakespeare’s famous phrase in Macbeth, “creeps in this petty pace from day to day;’’ in the words of Tennyson’s poem he recognizes this passive acceptance, “as tho’ to breathe were life!” No, says Ulysses, he will not “hoard myself…a gray spirit”.
Let me make my point again: Although it seems like an elderly Ulyssess is embracing action, movement forward, it is in actuality the twenty-four-year-old poet who is urging himself to live his life and not give up. Onward, he proclaims, “to follow knowledge like a sinking star.”
To follow knowledge? What? What is he talking about? A few lines earlier he was determined to amass new experiences, to go onward in life, shining as a sword in use as opposed to rusting in a scabbard. Now he wants knowledge: Not experience, action, movement onward? It is strange, very strange, that what he seeks is “knowledge.” Well, no one said Ulysses has to be consistent…. I think it is at this moment that the poem, to use a word the theorist Jacques Derrida favored, deconstructs itself. That Ulysses would seek knowledge is not ‘realistic’ in the monologue; that the poet, Tennyson would seek knowledge is not so very strange. Tennyson was not, as compared to Ulysses, a man of action: He was a man who thought; he was capable of understanding, capable of new knowledge. In Wordsworth’s The Prelude, the young Wordsworth at Cambridge sees a statue of Newton, “forever voyaging the silent seas of thought, alone.” This is the Ulysses Tennyson is imaging at this moment in the poem, voyaging into new seas of knowledge.
In the middle section of Tennyson’s poem Ulysses considers his son Telemachus, who will inherit the kingship, who will exercise “slow prudence.’ (We recall that in the opening lines Ulysses rejected ruling by ‘meting and doling out unequal laws.’) Yet here he says his son will do exactly that, although the “savage race” is now slightly diminished to “a rugged people.” Telemachus is Ulysses’s inheritor, and will govern Ithaka, “centred in the sphere/ Of common duties.” He will live life, and rule, guided by the virtues of common sense and common duties. But that is not Ulysses’s world: “He works his work, I mine.” No, Ulysses will venture forth to sea again, an explorer once more, not content to rule that which he has returned to and reclaimed. Onward, onward, forever onward.
It is a lovely notion, that as we age we must forever venture into the unknown, must embrace the “gloomy…dark, broad seas.” Yes, he and his fellow sailors are near the end of life – “you and I are old,” he stresses, going forward to state that “Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.” There is more to be done; death, as Dylan Thomas once put it, “Death shall have no dominion.” [You can find the poem by typing into your web browser ‘Dylan Thomas’ and ‘death shall have no dominion.’] Death may be the final ending for the Greek hero, as for all of us, but while life remains for Ulysses, its time has not yet come. (Thomas’s poem seems to be a response to, or maybe a continuation, of Tennyson’s. This kind of nexus is known as intertextuality, one text referring to and limning the relations it has with another text. In Thomas’s poem, the sailors are dead, under the sea, yet “Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again.” Quite clearly, as least to me, in the Thomas poem it is Ulysses and his sailors who are “strapped to the wheel…..under the windings of the sea.” But “death shall have no dominion,” for “though they be mad and dead as nails,” they shall rise again. [The word “mad appears twice in the poem. Shades of Ahab, whom I will refer to shortly!] It seems a Christian poem, but I think it is pre-Christian. Death is not the end of things. Not because of Christ’s rising, but because, well, death is not the end.)
There is a temptation, I think, for many readers to skip quickly over the middle section about Telemachus. But we readers, today, shall not succumb to this temptation. For the middle section describes the life most of us live, what most of us plow through most of the time. “Slow prudence…useful and good…common duties…decent…tenderness…adoration to my household gods.” Telemachus does what most humans do in adulthood: He works dutifully to make life better, make people more tender. He strives for the “useful and the good.” There is a large span, for most us the whole of our working life, in which we labor in the trenches of our culture to maintain life, to give it shape, to make the various ‘things’ of the world function successfully for us and our fellows. We give these activities the name of ‘work.’
For Tennyson, Ulysses eschews that. He says of Telemachus, “He works his work, I mine.” His is a rejection not just of bourgeois striving, but of almost all of human existence. In skipping over the central stanza of Tennyson’s poem, many readers reject the lives they themselves have lived and are living. Shaping a more humane world is, well, something Ulysses thinks we can skip over. Exploration, striving, are what he holds up as his purpose, and in doing this he rejects the central activities and functions of most of most people’s lives.
Is Ulysses right? Should the youthful impatience with what is, and the desire for ‘more,’ be the controlling passion of human life? As Hemingway wrote in the last line of The Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
The great poet of always moving onward may be Charles Baudelaire. Was he responding to Tennyson’s poem when he wrote the concluding poem of the second edition of Les Fleurs de Mal (book published in 1861, poem written 1859)? That poem, ‘The Voyage,” has eight sections and is one of the great works of the nineteenth century. Its fifth section is astonishingly brief: In its entirety, it is: “Et puis, et puis encore?” (Translated by Robert Lowell as “Yes, and what else?”). Baudelaire’s poem concludes magnificently on that theme of continuing exploration that was initiated by Tennyson:
Ô Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! levons l'ancre!
Ce pays nous ennuie, ô Mort! Appareillons!
Si le ciel et la mer sont noirs comme de l'encre,
Nos coeurs que tu connais sont remplis de rayons!Verse-nous ton poison pour qu'il nous réconforte!
Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brûle le cerveau,
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe?
Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!
I translated these lines literally in a long letter I sent out about Joachim du Bellay and Baudelaire (type ‘du Bellay and Gutman’ in your browser):
Death, old captain, it is time! Lift anchor!
This country bores us, O Death! Cast off!
If the sky and sea are dark as ink
Our hearts (which you know, Death) are full of lightOnly when we drink poison are we well —
we want, while this fire so burns our brain tissue,
to drown in the abyss — heaven or hell,
who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find the new.
Baudelaire sought to move ever onward regardless of whether success would ensue – “who cares?” – because staying immersed in ‘bourgeois’ life would lead to ennui. He was of the party of Ulysses, not Telemachus.
Let us return to Tennyson. His poem rejects Telemachus in favor of ongoing exploration on the seas, of venturing into the unknown. His wish is for new discoveries. But there is something out there that resists our wishful thinking. The external world is recalcitrant: It is not easily subject the shaping force of our desires. Wallace Stevens wrote, “The pears are not seen/As the observer wills,” telling us that the world exists apart from volition. It is just there. The pears, and all that exists outside of the self and its willed consciousness of the world, are intractable.
Perhaps living in the given world, shaping our human environment, may be the major element of human life, not the ‘exploration’ we dreamed of in our youth. This is not a romantic truth; and since the youthful passion for exploration still lives deep within us, we often reject a commitment to “common duties” for a need to explore. This middle stanza of the poem questions whether a life of continual seeking is actually better than trying to shape the world so that it is more “tender’ to those who live in it.
In the contrast between the middle stanza, and the opening and concluding stanzas, Tennyson reveals a stunning polarity that shapes the human world. Striving for more – or largely accepting what is. Along that polarity are strung our human actions. Striving, exploration, receives all the kudos, especially in this poem.
We are attracted to the grand gesture, the sailing off to explore the unknown. We want in some fashion, to hear about Captain Ahab (another sailor setting out to sea), mad to chase after a white whale; so, like Ahab, we reject Ishmaels’s vision that “We must lower, or at least shift, [the human] conceit of admirable felicity…placing it in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside in the country.” Ahab may be more exciting, but Ishmael’s recognition is, I think, one that Melville understood. In many ways, Moby-Dick is Melville’s exploration of the tension between stanzas one and two of Tennyson’s poem, between striving and everyday duty. Ahab exists as a strong and compelling character, but he is really insane; Ishmael, we realize, is the sole survivor of the voyage outward upon the broad sea.
Yet Tennyson’s poem is stirring, just as mad Ahab is stirring. We must remind ourselves that the poem is, despite coming to us as the dramatic monologue of an aged man, a poem about the author facing the early years of the middle of his life. Rejecting the course of Telemachus is fine for the aged Ulysses (whom no one wants around, anyway), but it may not be an apt decision for Telemachus himself. Addressing “common duties” does not seem as heroic as the life advocated by the long last stanza, but it has its nobilities nonetheless.
We reach that stunning final long stanza. The ship is about to leave port and sail; the aged sailors await. They were once – one cannot stress the adjective enough – “free.” Although the speaker immediately recognizes that now, “You and I are old.” They can yet do, for “Some work of noble note, may yet be done.” The speaker proposes such noble deeds still inspire his men, who in earlier times were men “that strove with Gods.”
Day (and life in old age) is ending, the ship is set to sail. “’Tis not too late to seek a newer world,” Ulysses exhorts. “Push off” and row and sail though the darkening years “until I die.” Striving, always striving, to find something more, perhaps to “touch the Happy Isles,/ And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.”
Then comes the most stirring line in the poem: “Tho’ much is taken, much abides.” This is, I propose, the relatively young Tennyson exhorting himself, not the old man counseling (with T. S. Eliot, “Old men ought to be explorers/ Here and there does not matter/ We must be still and still moving…Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,/ The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters/ Of the petrel and the porpoise.”) [Italics, mine. Note again the intertextuality. Eliot, Thomas, even Melville: Tennyson’s great and stirring poem invited responses and addenda.]
At the monologue’s conclusion, Ulysses and his sailing companions will fare forward, aged, “made weak by time and fate,” but still striving, “strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Has any other poem ended with more stirring lines? I doubt it. This is Tennyson at his best.
And yet, and yet. Is this really what old age is about, striving, always striving? Having reached what can be called old age (I am eighty-two) I am not so sure about all this striving and seeking. And what is there, now, to find?
The model Tennyson proposed to his young-ish self is perhaps not as suitable to old age as the poem proposes, and it may be that we as humans should not adopt Ulysses’s values in the Tennyson recounting of his aging meditation. Consider that in Shakespeare’s great late play, Gloucester says to King Lear, “Ripeness is all,” his commentary on what happens to older humans. It may be that we ripen and fall from the tree in natural process.
There is may be an alternative route, in aging, to continual searching. John Keats wrote, in what I think is the greatest of his odes, “To Autumn,” the declining season has its own rewards, and these rewards may not center on the striving that Ulysses counsels. Autumn, Keats proposes, is a “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” Keats was twenty-five when he died, and “To Autumn” was his last poem, composed a bit over a year earlier as he was already succumbing to the tuberculosis which killed him. Perhaps he knew more, and better, of death than Tennyson, who wrote “Ulysses” when he was in his mid-twenties, and would live to be eighty-four.
As we age, we seek to understand how to deal with what is before us: Decline and ultimately death. For many, including T. S. Eliot and Tennyson’s contemporary Charles Baudelaire, aging required the courage to persevere, to initiate new exploration. To Keats, the awareness of death meant not exploration but acceptance of the richness around him. Tennyson’s example of Ulysses and his counsel seem heroic. Keats’s counsel, tinged with sadness, seems less so. Both wrote in early middle age, although Tennyson had most of his life ahead of him, while Keats was already dying.
“Ulysses” prepared Tennyson to live the life to come. Keats, on the other hand, knew that the voyage we humans make on the sea of existence was neither limitless nor endless. ‘Mellow fruitfulness” and an end to “the weariness, the fever and the fret/Here” may be, as Keats imagined it as he faced his own death, what humans can embrace as the darkness looms. Which route beckons – or could it be a combination of both?
The young poet, very powerfully, portrays the need to move ever onward. Age may slow humans down, curtail some aspects of what they can still do. In this remarkable monologue, Alfred Tennyson shows us the greatest hero of the West facing face old age and mortality. He sets up a major possibility for all human beings: We too can chose, even when “made weak by time and fate,” to venture forward evermore, “strong in will/ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”