Ulysses’ analysis

Alfred Tennyson wrote Ulysses when a his important friend was dead. The protagonist of the poem, that i salso a monologue, is Ulysses, the King of Itaca. The figure of Ulysses was used by a lots of writers, such as James Joyce, Omero in his poem Odyssey, Dante in Divina Commedia, in particulary in the circle of Inferno and A. Tennyson. Why did they chose this figure? Because he has got a tension to know and he is aware that human beings have got feelings and rationale and they can be conditioned by “fascinazione”. Ulysses of A. Tennyson isn’t young, he isn’t young, he ins’t energetic and when he returns at home he stays in an island not in a peninsula, like Omer’s Ulysses. The poem starts with the description of a group of people who is eating, sleeping and being more rich, but these people doesn’t know Ulysses. Ulysses represents the travel, indeed at the beginning of the poem Tennyson talks about Ulysses’ travel, the meeting with Iadi, the different costums and traditions and the battle of Troy. Ulysses loves travels, he hates to stay in the same place for a long time, because he needs to travel; to not travel means to not live in an intense way. The goal of Ulysses is “to follow knowledge like a sinking star” and in this goal Tennyson expresses human beings’ condition: they want to know to arrive at the absolute, they want to arrive at the limit of the humen thought. Ulysses know to be old and he decides to leave Itaca island at his son Telemaco who must travel and continue his father’s travel. After the description of Telemaco, Ulysses speaks about his ship and seamen, that are friends who worked with him. He is talking about his memories and his travels to express the death. But before the death he wants go to sea when the sun goes down and the moonlight is born; in a word the travel during the sunset and he wants to travel until the death. But he isn’t afraid, because he know to be, with his friends, heroes. They were aware to have not forces, because they are old and forces were influenced by the time, but they still have got the will to fight, to find, to search and to not code. These are the most important feautures of people who lived during the modern age.