ULYSSES

The text by Tennyson is Ulysses's monologue . It starts whit an impersonal nature to outlines little by little his thought and his behaviour beyond the unlike Ithaca society. He feels the necessity to leave Ithaca (“I cannot rest to travel”) to “drink life to the lees”, to continue an existence of voyage to know other “cities of men, and manners, climates, councils, governments”. He consider the sedentariness like boredom, like a life loss. He is ready “to leave the sceptre and the isle” to his son Thelemacus, to leave “a rugged people” in need of somebody who “subdue them to the useful and the good”. In the fourth stanza the dialogue is expressly addressed to his mariners, “souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought”, in an exhortation “to seek an newer world”.

The poem is made of five stanzas of different height that could be divided into 4 section which distinct thematic. It is not used a strict structure or layout (the use of iambic pentameter is not absolute) but the text appears fluid and natural, whit many run-on-lines to simulate Ulysses’s speech. The writer poses much attention on stresses, and it is very visible in the last line (“to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”), an in changing beats to give the poem a more realistic feel. All connotative level is conditioned by the need to give a realistic voice to Ulysses and that comports the use of a middle-high lexical register and of simple but significant figure of speech.