Analyses of Tennyson's "Ulysses"

Tennyson wrote "Ulysses" in October 1833 after the death of his friend at Cambridge University, Arthur Henry Hallam; for this reason the text is resulted from the poet's sense of loss. The title reminds the reader to the character taken from Homer's "Odyssey" and last but not least to the character taken from Dante's "Inferno". Dante puts Ulysses, a young man, in Hell because he dared to go beyond Hercules pillars, so he challenged the limit; Tennyson, on the contrary, revalued the mythical figure of Ulysses generally associated with the desire of knowledge. Ulysses provides the reader an example of intelligence, smartness, courage, strength, and an image of a person who fought for his knowledge.

The poem is a dramatic monologue, that adopts the first person, and the speaking voice is not the poet, but is Ulysses. Indeed, dramatic monologue consists of a poetic form that develops in Victorianism and uses an external person as the narrator. This leads to an emotional distance that gives a more objective view of things allowing the observer to have different points of view.

The setting is an island, which is Ithaca. The poem starts with the presentation of Ulysses, who is an idle king married with an aged wife. He defines savage the people who live in the island because there are not rules and unequal laws; so Tennyson criticizes the Victorian age's society in indirect way, because he doesn't want to give oneself away. In the line 11 "I am become a name" Ulysses says that he has become the man who is through his experiences; in the quotation the poet uses a verb of perception. During his voyages, he has seen and known a lot of things, for example different men, manners, climates, governments.