Tennyson’s Ulysses is a dramatic monologue, a poetic form in which there’s a single person , in this case Ulysses, who is speaking in a specific situation at a critical moment. The dramatic monologue embeds different forms of speech: for example use of deictics and false starts. Ulysses is the same character of Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno.
In the first stanza Tennyson focuses on Itaca. Ulysses reflects on the sense of life and on the sense of his voyage. He is thinking about his existence and he is expected to rule over a “savage race”. Reading the description of Itaca the intelligent reader may understand Ulysses is speaking about a thing in front of him. The descrption of the landscape is negative: “barren crags” or “savage race”. The word “profits” has a key position and it is based on Victorian Age, as “facts” for Dickens.
The second part tells about Ulysses’s desire “to follow knowledge like a sinking star”. He tells about his experience and he would like to live his life fully and he said “I cannot rest from travel”. He could know himself only through adventures, he became rich thanks of his experience of life. He wants to go beyond the human limits, so Dante located him in his Inferno. He is became who he is thank to his friends: “I am a part of all that I have met”, “cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments”. It is important the analogy between the life experience and an arch that Tennyson’s explains in this kind: “yet all experience is an arch where through gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move ”. life is a condition of desire, there are always lots of thing to discover.
The third stanza is the introduction of Telemachus: he represents the Victorian mentality. He is Ulysses’s son but he’s different from his father, he is more close to heart than to reason. He will have to subdue a “rugged people”. “useful” and ”good” are Victorian words. “He works his work, I mine” underlines the difference between Ulysses and his son.
In the fourth stanza Ulysses addresses to his mariners. They are in front of the port, Tennyson in this part uses a lots of deictics: for example “there lies the port” or “there gloom the dark broad seas”. Mariners are loyal men: “souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me”. Ulysses and his friend are old and they faced to great sufferings “the thunder and the sunshine, and opposed free hearts, free foreheads”. There is the contraposition between head and heart. The contrast between the infinite greatness of Ulysses’ soul and his finite human status is visible through contrasts in the text: for example “he works his work, I mine”, “his honour and his toil”. Tennyson shows Ulysses’ desire to live and to know. The stanza took place during a calm evening where the light is reflected by the rocks.
The last stanza is characterised by the contrast between the mariners’ age and the strength of their souls. Ulysses and his mariners are the same people, Tennyson uses the pronoun WE to identify them. They are old but characterised by of “one equal temper of heroic hearts, make weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”.