Reading Tennyson


     Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) was born in Lincolnshire (a county in the midlands of England), the third of eleven children of a clergyman. Tennyson ultimately was knighted for his work as a poet, and is therefore often referred to by his title as Lord Tennyson or as Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

     Poetry was Tennyson's life.  At the age of five he was writing poetry, and during his mid-teens he was producing skillfully-crafted poems. At   university in Cambridge, Tennyson came under the influence of the Romantics, especially Keats, who were just having their poetry published when Tennyson began his college career. As he read Keats, Tennyson was influenced to write sensuous poetry (poetry filled with the perception of the senses).  His first book of poetry, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, published in 1830, was noted by the critics of the day as containing poetry influence by Keats.  In his later poetry, Tennyson moved to writing poetry that was the opposite of sensuous: an acceptance of duty, social responsibility, and pain. (For example, contrast Keats's sensuous "La Belle Dame" against the very different "Ulysses" by Tennyson.)

     His second book of poetry, Poems, published in 1832, received some scathing reviews, and, as a result, Tennyson published nothing for the next ten years. The same year as the scathing reviews came the death at 22 of Arthur Henry Hallam, a close friend who was engaged to one of Tennyson's sisters. The brooding, pensive, despairing work of this period, filled with poetry concerning death and the futility of life, was later published in In Memoriam (published in 1850).

     In 1850, at the death of Wordsworth, Tennyson was named the Poet Laureate of England, a position whose influence and responsibility he took quite seriously. Tennyson publish many other pieces of poetry and prose. Among those most often remembered and still read is Idylls of the King, a retelling of the King Arthur story which has as its theme how a noble civilization can decay morally. Many see his Idylls of the King as a thinly-veiled commentary on the England of his day, an England moving into the full throes of the industrial revolution and emerging as the leading colonial power and leading world power of the time.

Read "Ulysses" pages 875-876

 

 
An Introduction to "Ulysses"


In the Greek poem,  The Odyssey, Homer tells the story of the Greek hero Odysseus (Tennyson uses the Roman or Latin version of the name, Ulysses). Odysseus is a young king who is called away from his island kingdom, Ithaca, to the war between the Greeks and Trojans. The war with Troy drags on for ten long years and ends with the victory of the Greeks. However, as they leave Troy, the Greeks overstep the boundaries of right moral action and desecrate the temples of the gods. As punishment, the Greek heroes are fated to find horror at home or spend a lengthy and dreadful journey to their homes.   The Odyssey is the story of the added ten long years of journey on the seas that Odysseus makes.

When he returns home after twenty years (ten years of the war at Troy and ten years on the journey home), Odysseus (Ulysses) finds his palace over run by suitors seeking the hand of his beautiful wife, Penelope, who has waited faithfully for him for twenty years.   Also at the palace is his young son, Telemachus, who is now twenty years old and who has never seen or known his father Odysseus (Ulysses).  Together, Odysseus and Telemachus rid the palace of the suitors; finally, Odysseus finds peace in his homeland.

Tennyson's poem picks up at the peaceful close of Odysseus's (Ulysses's) life, with Tennyson thinking this powerful man could no more sit still for his final years of his life than he could decide not to fight for twenty years to return home.  The poem "Ulysses" is Tennyson's view of what happens to Odysseus (Ulysses) after the close of the Odyssey.

 



Themes to Notice in "Ulysses"

  1. the use of myth to express a universal idea

  2. the human capacity for aspiration against all odds

  3. the human urge to strive rather than to sit still

  4. meditations on the fact of death

 

 

 

 

Study Guide to "Ulysses"


1. What does the speaker think his situation is, as revealed in the first stanza (lines 1-5)?

2. "Lees" (line 7) refers to the bits of grape remaining at the bottom of a bottle of wine. The speaker says he has drunk life to the lees. What is the comparison of the wine to life?

3. In what ways, in his early life, had the speaker "become a name" (lines 11).

4. What has the speaker "seen and known" (13) in his life, as stated in lines 13 through 17?

5. In what way can it be true that the speaker says "I am a part of all that I have met" (line 18)?

6. What is the speaker trying to say literally when he states that "all experience is an arch where-through / Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades / Forever and forever when I move" (lines 19-21)?

7. What is it the speaker longs for when he says, "How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rest unbrunished, not to shine in use! / As though to breathe were life!" (lines 22-25)?

8. What are the characteristics of the speaker's son Telemachus, according to him?

9. What are the contrasts between the speaker and his son as men and as kings?

10. Stanza three (lines 44) begins the speaker's consideration of  his ship and his men. What do his men and he have in common?

11. What does the speaker intend to do with his ships?

12. What does the speaker mean when he says "though much be taken, much abides" (65)?

13. What does the last line of the poem suggest to you?