Ulysses

Summary

Ulysses is a seventy-line dramatic monologue in blank verse that Tennyson wrote in October 1833, within weeks of learning that his closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, had died suddenly in Vienna. He published it in his two-volume Poems of 1842. The speaker is Homer's Odysseus, called by his Latin name, years after his return to Ithaca. Homer has the prophet Tiresias foretell that he will make one more journey inland and die a gentle death in old age; Dante, in Inferno XXVI, imagines instead that he set out again with his old companions past the Pillars of Hercules and drowned within sight of a mountain. Tennyson takes the moment before that last voyage. In the first movement the aged king, idle by his hearth among barren crags, scorns the dull work of ruling a savage race who hoard, sleep and feed and do not know him. He cannot rest from travel; he has enjoyed and suffered greatly, become a name, and seen cities, peoples and the plains of windy Troy. He is a part of all he has met, yet experience is an arch through which the untravelled world gleams and recedes. To pause is to rust, and he longs to follow knowledge like a sinking star. In the second movement he presents his son Telemachus, who will inherit the island and by slow prudence civilize its people, blameless and devoted to common duties and the household gods: he works his work, I mine. Readers differ on whether this praise is warm or faintly condescending. In the third movement he turns to the harbour and to his old mariners. They are old, but death closes all, and some work of noble note may yet be done. As the long day wanes and the moon climbs, he urges them to push off and sail beyond the sunset until he dies, perhaps to be drowned, perhaps to reach the Happy Isles and see Achilles. The poem ends with its most famous line: though much is taken, they remain strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Tennyson later said the poem expressed his feeling about the need to go forward after Hallam's death.

Top Lessons

• Life is more than breathing

  Ulysses refuses to rust unburnished and insists that every hour saved from death should bring something new. The poem gives a powerful voice to the conviction that a human life is measured by its use and striving rather than by its length.

• Two callings, one household

  The middle section sets the father's vocation of adventure beside the son's vocation of patient government. Ulysses calls Telemachus blameless and fitted for the useful and the good, then says he works his work, I mine. The poem invites readers to weigh the heroic and the domestic as different kinds of duty.

• Courage in old age

  Ulysses and his mariners are old and weakened by time and fate, yet he insists that something ere the end may yet be done. Written by a grieving young poet, the poem turns loss into resolution, and its closing line has become a motto for perseverance.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The poem is a portrait of old age refusing decline: Ulysses and his men are made weak by time and fate yet strong in will. It was also written in the first weeks of Tennyson's mourning for Hallam, and Tennyson himself described it as his response to the need to go on after that loss; it can be read as a record of grief turned into resolve, though the speaker never mentions grief directly.

• Lines 49-53 and 65-70

  Ulysses admits that he and his mariners are old and weakened, and insists that age still has its honour and its work.