“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” These simple words from “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson became one of the most famous lines in poetry, and with them the acclaimed poet assumes the rousing eloquence that Homer’s epic hero might have had.
Written in 1833, the poem presents us with a portrait of Ulysses, as called by the Romans, or as known by the Greeks, Odysseus, after the events of Homer’s “Odyssey.”
Indeed, Tennyson’s dramatic monologue “Ulysses,” called a “perfect poem” by T.S. Eliot, is an apt demonstration of the persuasive capabilities of that Greek warrior who was renowned for his intellect. As a dramatic monologue, a form in which the poet assumes the voice of an individual character, the poem gives us Ulysses’s words, and thus the reader learns of the events through his perspective.
The poem, like Ulysses’s character, draws contradictory interpretations. Many can well understand why Dante consigns Ulysses to the fires of the Inferno for his misuse of his gift of rhetoric during the Trojan War; others hear Tennyson’s words and, with a renewed zeal for life, would fain take to their ships as Ulysses’s modern-day crewmates. In the end, the question is whether there is merit in never yielding in one’s quest for adventure and heroism, or if yielding itself is sometimes a virtue.
Virtue Becomes Vice
The opening of the poem seems irreproachably reasonable: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.
If idle hands are indeed the devil’s playground, Ulysses is right to strive to avoid that fate to which Dante would consign him. Who would not pity the travel-weary king who returns to his homeland only to find his wife now aged and his subjects unappreciative?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.
Ulysses arrives at the point in which peacetime is distasteful to him; rest is a burden. Honor lies not in the successful voyage but in the continuing journey. There must be something more to life than this stationary existence, than seeing the same faces every day and serving them when his talents could be better put to use elsewhere: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!
No, it is not only dull but also “vile” to waste such intellect as his, to “store and hoard” himself when there are far nobler pursuits: “To follow knowledge like a sinking star,/ Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”
The joyful reunion with his family, which led him to travel for 10 years after the Trojan War, failed to live up to the imaginings of the past decade. He speaks of his wife and son in a detached manner, and even though Telemachus is “well-loved” by him, Ulysses says, “He works his work, I mine.” In his estimation, Telemachus will make a capable ruler in his stead, and this substitution will be for the good of the people.
Work ethic, knowledge, heroism, and valor. Ulysses has worthy intentions, and on the surface, his words hardly seem objectionable. However, he betrays himself in saying that he has been home only three days, and his thoughts are not at all centered on his wife and subjects as he would have his audience believe.
Some Work of Noble Note
In the third and final section of the poem, Ulysses addresses his former crewmates and urges them to undertake one final voyage with him: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.
Far nobler than his work at home, Ulysses says, would be a continuation of their past adventures, for “'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.” Indeed, the ideal life would be an unceasing adventure, and Ulysses proclaims that his intention to go holds fast:For my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die.
He has no intention of returning, and one can assume that the voyage home which he undertook in the “Odyssey” was done for the journey’s sake rather than for the purpose of returning home and reassuming his responsibilities. Ulysses is well aware of the likely end of this voyage, for he notes: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.
Death is but another adventure, but behind the bravery in Ulysses’s speech there is a carelessness with his own life and even a disregard for the impact that his death would have on his family.
At the close of his eloquent address, Ulysses urges his companions to be unyielding. His words seem to encourage his audience to foster the virtues of courage, fortitude, and perseverance. Yet if he develops these virtues to the extreme, they cease to be virtues at all.
Aristotle defined moral behavior as the mean between the two extremes of excess and deficiency. Ulysses is unyielding to the extreme, and brave perseverance turns to the refusal to yield even when his responsibilities to his family and kingdom demand it.
Through his poem, Tennyson demonstrates that it is not always a weakness to yield our will to that of others. Sometimes yielding is the more heroic course of action.
