Tennyson’s Ulysses as a poem of adventure/ poem of escape

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.’