Today’s Poem: Ulysses

How shall we age? How shall we die? By seeking one last great thing.

J.M.W. Turner, Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, 1829 (Wikimedia Commons)

Ulysses

by 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.

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The more one knows of poetry, the higher rises the estimation of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892). Unwillingly, perhaps. Critics want America’s Victorian-era laurels to go to Whitman or Dickinson. Perhaps not Browning among British poets much anymore, but Hopkins certainly, or the dark horse of Arnold. Here’s the sad truth, however: The more one sands away the edges to expose the core of 19th-century literature, the more one discerns Tennyson’s features. Like or dislike him, he towers: stately and sane and immensely talented.

Take, for example, “Ulysses,” the seventy lines of blank verse that Tennyson wrote in 1833 and published in the 1842 Poems, his second book of verse. It’s fashionable these days to disparage the poem. Partly that’s from the desire to find Victorians other than Tennyson to promote. And partly it’s from the over-easy critical bromide that past ages of Western civilization were evil — especially the era of British imperialism. If Tennyson is found at the center of that age, then he must somehow stand for or encourage racism and colonialization, the lack of evidence in “Ulysses” be damned.

Photograph of Tennyson in 1862 (Wikimedia Commons)

Matthew Arnold once pointed out that the attitudes and proclamations of Ulysses in the poem are about as far from those of Homer’s Odysseus as it’s possible to imagine. T.S. Eliot added that Tennyson lacked the ability to do narrative in short compass. The complaints are fair enough, but they came in the midst of those poets’ general admiration for the poem. More modern analyses tend to start with a general suspicion of the poet and his poem — a suspicion that claws and nibbles at “Ulysses,” seeking something to complain about.

Better, I think, is to begin with the assumption that Tennyson intended the flow and prosody of the poem. At the beginning, the poem is a dramatic monologue of the kind that Browning would master: an old king, tired of ruling, reflects on how much he misses his youthful heroic adventures. His thoughts are not meant for others to hear (else he would not call his wife “aged” or his countrymen savages that only “hoard, and sleep, and feed”). Life was better “on the ringing plains of windy Troy.”

Something happens in lines 19 to 21, however, to alter the dramatic monologue of an old king and ex-hero grumbling to himself. Reflecting on how his past actions endure in memory and an altered world, Ulysses declares:

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.

Matthew Arnold observed how this passage drags in near-spondees, enjambment, and long syllables demoted to unaccented beats (“these three lines by themselves,” he snarked, “take up nearly as much time as a whole book of the Iliad”). But let’s suppose that Tennyson meant all of this. He wants to slow us down because this thought — a naive philosophical notion of the relation of time and space to experience — triggers a change in the speaker. The dramatic monologue begins to morph into the public speech of a public man. Ulysses starts to assume again the mantle of leader, inspiring others to join him.

Triremes on a wall painting in Pompeii, c. 79 A.D. (Wikimedia Commons)

And the poem builds along that line until we have pure, almost demagogic oration of the inspiring ending. “Come, my friends, / ’T is not too late to seek a newer world,” Tennyson writes. For “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” — still “strong in will” and thus able “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

To what end? For what purpose other than the cult of experience? We are not told. Swept up in Ulysses’ passion, we do not even notice the absence of concrete goals. And that’s the demagogic part of the oration. But the public speech to which the poem builds still inspires, because it offers an answer to questions of how shall we grow old, how shall we die.

By seeking one last great thing, Tennyson’s Ulysses answers: one last great striving in the final strength of age.

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