TENNYSON - ULYSSES

The poem "Ulysses"was written in October 1833, after the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson's friend, which seemed to Tennyson a calamity.

The poem is based on a combination of Homer's Odyssey with Dante's version of Ulysses' story. The poem is written as a dramatic monologue, where there is someone who is speaking but different from the poet. In this case Ulysses is speaking.

 Tennyson's Ulysses is particular because he is an old man different from the young traditional Homer's Ulysses. It immediately emerges right from the beginning of the poem where Ulysses says "an idle king" refers to his age. Going on reading, Ulysses seems to not accept anymore his island Ithaca. Through words like "still",
"barren", crags", Tennyson describes a man who doesn't like island. People
living there are "unequal" and "savage" so they seems to be very uncultured
people. Savage is someone who has no culture, in opposition to the protagonist
who reaches new experiences in his life. So it emerges a character who desires
to leave is country. In line 5 there is a language deviation to focus the very
negative alliteration of sounds "and know not me".

In order to support the idea of the desire to leave the country, in line 6 Ulysses says " I cannot rest to travel" because he wants to learn about life. His desire of learning is expressed through a lexical choice: the semantic field of "feeding".

In addition, in line 16 Ulysses remembers his great past. He is remembering the battle of Troy: it is an image of joy and movement. Everything Ulysses has lives is part of him " I am a part of all that I have met". But that is not asimply story, Tennyson wants to underline the difficult situations in England during the Victorian era where the most important point are Puritanism,Utilitarianism, and Darwinism. People during the Victorian era were all the same and they did the same thing. They produced only for progress.