Right from the title the reader understands the main character of the poem. The title is “Ulysses”. He may be the famous protagonist of the Greeks tragedies. The poem may deals with his adventures or his feeling or sensations after the war of Troy.

The poem was composed by Lord Alfred Tennyson, a poet of Victorian period. The poem is written in a new style: the dramatic monologue. It consists in a character who speaks even if he was in a drama. He uses Ulysses because is suitable to the message he will give.

The monologue is composed by five stanzas.

The reader understands immediately that the speaking voice is Ulysses. He is doing a rational process with a long argumentation

The first one develops in five lines. In this paragraph Ulysses tells to the reader his return to Itaca and what he had found here. He is an idle king who returns in a hearth no more fertile, his wife is old and his subjects were like savage who don’t follow laws and they don’t know him more. The situation has no profits for him, so he is probably going to leave again. It represents the Victorian theme of profit.

In the second part he reassures the reader. He says that he isn’t able to stop travelling because he will live every experience at her most and he will know what he doesn’t know. He also underlines that he is always alone when he does his voyages. The most important sentence of the stanza is “I am become a name”. It means that he becomes important. The sentence has a grammatical mistake to underline the importance of it: it’s used the verb to be instead of using to have. To be is used because it expresses the life and not the posses of the change, because only if he exists he can live.