Ulysses

This noble poem, which is said to have induced Sir Robert Peel to give
Tennyson his pension, was written soon after Arthur Hallam’s death,
presumably therefore in 1833. “It gave my feeling,” Tennyson said to
his son, “about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of
life perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam.” It is not the
Ulysses of Homer, nor was it suggested by the Odyssey. The germ,
the spirit and the sentiment of the poem are from the twenty-sixth
canto of Dante’s Inferno, where Ulysses in the Limbo of the Deceivers
speaks from the flame which swathes him. I give a literal version of
the passage:—

“Neither fondness for my son nor reverence for my aged sire nor the due
love which ought to have gladdened Penelope could conquer in me the
ardour which I had to become experienced in the world and in human vice
and worth. I put out into the deep open sea with but one ship and with
that small company which had not deserted me.... I and my companions
were old and tardy when we came to that narrow pass where Hercules
assigned his landmarks. ‘O brothers,’ I said, ‘who through a hundred
thousand dangers have reached the West deny not to this the brief vigil
of your senses that remain, experience of the unpeopled world beyond
the sun. Consider your origin, ye were not formed to live like Brutes
but to follow virtue and knowledge.... Night already saw the other pole
with all its stars and ours so low that it rose not from the ocean
floor’” (Inferno, xxvi., 94-126).

But if the germ is here the expansion is Tennyson’s; he has added
elaboration and symmetry, fine touches, magical images and magical
diction. There is nothing in Dante which answers to—

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

or

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.

Of these lines well does Carlyle say what so many will feel: “These
lines do not make me weep, but there is in me what would till whole
Lacrymatorics as I read”.

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 for ever 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,
’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.
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.