Ulysses is a poem
by the Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), written in 1833 and
published in 1842 in Tennyson’s well-received second volume of poems. In the
poem Ulysses decribes , to an unspecified audience, his discontent and
restlessness upon returning to his kingdom Ithaca, after his far-ranging
travels. Facing old age, Ulysses yearns to explore again, despite his reunion
with his wife Penelope and son Telemachus.
Assimilation of experience and dissolution of it in favour
of a perfect one are two conflicting modes of human life. Tennyson is an expert
explorer of these modes of life. Ulysses aestheticizes
Ulysses’ insatiable thirst for knowledge. The poem springs from the poet’s powerful
feelings prompted by Hallam’s death. In it we see Tennyson’s determined
resolution to overcome the mood of despair and face life after the temporary
stagnation caused by the death of his friend. The main theme of the poem is
that work is worship.Life is meant for ceaseless work.Life of rest from all
toils and moils is not desired; it is abhorrence, a death in life existence.
So, life, for Ulysses, is a long journey from the known to the unknown.
The whole poem is solely the speech of Ulysses , who, through
his speech, gives vent to his pent-up feelings of enervation and desiccation,
emotional outpours of having fresh adventures, and of a deep-seated penchant
for knowledge and indomitable desire to conquer new worlds. The nympholepsy of
Ulysses, for whom travel is the parable of soul-making, culminates in the
classic metaphor, “ I will drink / Life to the lees.” It is worth pointing out that Ulysses’ is the
Renaissance heroism and Romantic egotism permeated with the melancholy feelings
as to the inevitability of death. There is no denying the fact that his
longed-for rendezvous, where he will meet his comrade, Achilles, may be the
world of death.
Like the Renaissance colonialists, Ulysses is
self-conscious, proud, sagacious, clever and what is more tyrannical.He is not
merely conscious of his world-wide name, for his heroism in the War of Troy,
but knows well how to subdue the philistine Ithacans by the slow doses of
tyranny.The realistic sense of Ulysses is manifest in summing up of his son’s
qualifications for gubernatorial duties. Thus, the character of Ulysses
embodies the Renaissance realism.
Ulysses is every inch an idealist. But his is the idealism ,
which is not blinded by the excess of
romance: “ Death closes all.” And yet, old age has its own field of honour,
heroism and action. For a spiritually conscious man physical decay has least
significance, because it is the mind which is important. To say this is not to
identify Ulysses with Milton’s Satan whose sole endeavour is to seek out the
virtuous and vilify it. Unlike Satan’s , Ulysses’ is pure egotism the aim of
which is “ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”, even in the midst of
‘time’s millioned accidents.’
