ANALYSIS OF ALFRED TENNYSON'S ULYSSES 

Alfred Tennyson's Ulysses is a poem written in the form of a dramatic monologue.

In the poem, written in 1833 on the occasion of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam's death, Tennyson reworks the figure of Ulysses by drawing on the ancient hero of Homer's Odyssey and the medieval hero of  Dante's Inferno, Ulysses.

Tennyson chooses the mythological figure of Ulysses because it is authoritative: it overcomes time references. Furthermore, it is well-known: people don't make any effort to understand who he is (the seeker for knowledge with a certain personality).

The text is organized into two main parts, in which the dramatis persona, Ulysses, reflects on his life and on his future desires: after his return to Ithaca, he starts resuming his administrative responsibilities, also referring to his son Telemachus, before embarking on his final voyage.

In the first line Ulysses introduces himself as an "idle king". He returned to Ithaca, his homeland, after a long journey and he finds a "still hearth", "barren crags", an "aged wife" and "a savage race": people are like beasts, they don't care about who rules them. In addition, the adjective "unequal" clashes with "law": it should be the instrument of justice, thus it reinforces
the concept that ruling over people is not so pleasant as it may appear.

Ulysses travelled a lot, experiencing innumerable places and situations ("I have enjoy'd / greatly, have suffer'd greatly"), and now, in Ithaca, he feels like a prisoner among unfamiliar people. Ulysses' willingness not to stay in such a suffocating place is underlined throughout the poem: he would like to escape from a place in which he cannot find his
needs. Ulysses is aware of the little time left to him: he is an aged man who had already experienced great deeds and now he is not young any longer.

Speaking to himself, he proclaims that he "cannot rest from travel" and he states that he "will drink life to the lees" (lines 8-9): he thinks that it is boring to stay always in the same place, because it reduces life to the simple act of breathing, whereas he knows that in fact life contains much more satisfactions and pleasures and he wants to encounter them.
His spirit yearns constantly for new experiences that will broaden his horizons: he wishes "to follow knowledge like a sinking star" and forever grow in wisdom and in learning.

 Moreover, the technique of accumulation makes the reader feel Ulysses' excitement and involvement in remembering his voyage again: in particular, he quotes the battles in Troy, so that the reader immediately creates a parallelism with Homer's Ulysses.

In the second part of the text Ulysses introduces the figure of Telemachus, his son, who represents another attitude to life: Ulysses declares his intention to leave him the kingdom, that is he is delegating his power to his son. He underlines some positive qualities of Telemachus: he is able to take care of the nation ("discerning to fulfil / this labour"), because he can make "a rugged people" mild and "subdue them to the useful and the goods".

Telemachus' features are very different from Ulysses' ones: he is more rational than his father, since Ulysses represents the dramatic nature of the human being.

Reading and analyzing the text, the intelligent reader can recognize a lot of perception verbs ("know not me", "when I am gone"), underlining the disrupted syntax of the whole poem: Ulysses' speech has got  a existential tissue, since it deals
with knowledge and moral values.

Another important element of the text is the referring to the sailors: if it is true that they are all old and near to death, like Ulysses, he declares that they still have the potential to do something noble and honorable.

He encourages them to make use of their old age because " 'tis not too late to seek a newer world": even if Ulysses and his sailors are not as strong as they were in youth, they are "strong in will", so Ulysses encourages them "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."