ANALYSIS OF LORD A. TENNISON'S "ULYSSES"

The title present the character of Ulysses, the famous hero(taken from Omer's "Odyssey") passed lot of tests to fight for what he was interested in: knowledge.

Tennyson present the hero like a old idle king, married with an old woman, who lives in an infertile island(that recalls to England) in which the inhabitants are savages(because of unequal laws ) and in addiction they don't the king. He doesn't stand the inhabitants because they focused their life in sleep and hoard. So the only way to escape is to voyage and to follow his aspiration( Dante put him into the hell because he dared to go beyond Hercules's columns). In his voyage in which he knows manners, climates, councils, governments he knows also himself. Therefore despite being old, the fire of knowledge burns still in him

To tell the story Tennyson uses the dramatic monologue: indeed the narrator is not the poet but Ulysses himself: in this way, using third person, he gives a more objective view of the scene but also to create an emotive distance: he uses Ulysses to criticize England and his only interest in produce goods because he cannot do it freely.

In fact he creates a new language for a new monologue: in the text are present syntactic errors: they are syntactic deviations: he use another form than common and right form. An example is to use " know not me" than don't know me, or in "I am become a man": in this case he uses the verb of perception approaching to modernism.