Ulysses’ Analysis

This poem is written as a dramatic monologue: the entire poem is spoken by a single character, an old Ulysses who makes his speech after returning to Ithaca and resuming his administrative responsibilities. Ulysses declares that his staying does not make sense home with his old wife, giving rewards and punishments for the people who live in his kingdom. Tennyson describe a man that doesn’t feel at home in his country, wondering about his past experiences and his present.

The lines are in blank verse which give naturalness to Ulysses’ speech. Many of the lines are enjambed, which means that a thought does not end with the line-break; the sentences often end in the middle, rather than the end, of the lines.

From the first line the lyric shows its link to the period in which it was composed, the Victorian Age. Indeed the word “profit” denounces the economic interests that characterized the Victorian society.

The image of the fireplace without fire and of the “barren crags”, on the second line, is connected with the unattractiveness of his home, where also the nature seems dying. The semantic field of sterility, reinforced by the image of an old (so unable to have sons) Penelope. “Savage race” is the expression used to describe Ulysses’ subjects and reminds to the intelligent reader the first rudimental form of psychological analysis (especially Jung’s theories). Savage is someone who has no culture, in opposition to the protagonist who reached a great wisdom and learning thanks to his journeys of knowledge. Those “savages” are described by their attitudes (“hoard, and sleep, and feed”) and some of those characteristics are typical of Victorian age.

Still speaking to himself, Ulysses,  proclaims that he “cannot rest from travel” but feels compelled to live at full and swallow every last drop of life. He has enjoyed all his experiences as a sailor who travels the seas, and he considers himself a symbol for everyone who wanders and roams the earth.  The protagonist has “enjoy'd” and “suffer'd” experiencing both the conditions sustained by Manichaeism and taken up by Victorianism, where ethical and moral aspects were essential. He also lived his adventures “with those that loved me, and alone”, experiencing both the life’s level: the first one is the community and the second one is the individual dimension.  Ulysses says “I am become a name” underlining that his quest was about his existential dimension too.

His desire of learning is expressed through an interesting lexical choice, that is the semantic field of “feeding”: Lord Tennyson uses expressions such “hungry heart” or “drunk delight” to stress the idea of Ulysses’ phagocytizing wishes of knowledge. The characterization of the character leads the reader to understand the passionate attitude of the protagonist.  

Ulysses declares that his travels and encounters have shaped who he is: “I am a part of all that I have met,” he asserts. He describes the experience as an “arch”, term that remind the trend of the life and of the day, which begins with the birth or the dawn and ends with the death or the night. The Greek hero speaks also about what he had not experienced using the expression “margin fades” that reveals the modern idea that the limit is only in man’s mind (is not physic) and can be trespassed throughout the good will. Also in this Ulysses is a Victorian man. He’s an old man but he’s still strong, brave, industrious. Indeed   he declares that it is boring to stay in one place, and that to remain stationary is to rust rather than to shine and to display heroism; to stay in one place is to pretend that all there is to life is the simple act of breathing, whereas he knows that in fact life contains much novelty. Ulysses is at the end of his life, where “Little remains”, and he wants “something more”: he wants to be a “bringer of new things” revealing his romantic nature, he wishes “to follow knowledge like a sinking star” and forever grow in learning. The figure of Ulysses stood as an important contemporary cultural icon, dealing with the desire to reach beyond the limits of one’s field of vision and the ordinary details of everyday life. He also expresses a sort of rebellion against bourgeois conformity.