The text by A. Tennyson is a dramatic monologue. It is written in free verse so it doesn’t have a rigid structural organization. The text is organized into six sections.

The dramatic monologue needs a dramatis persona: it is Ulysses, a mythological figure that comes from Ancient Greece myths, in particular from Omer’s Odyssey. 

In traditional literature his figure is considered very important: it is resumed in many different periods: two famous examples could be Dante that placed him in Hell (27th Canto) and Joyce that uses it metaphorically in this “Ulysses”.

He is the man who wants to discover everything that is hidden, to explore the world, going beyond the limits (that’s why Dante puts him in Hell).

Tennyson changes the characteristic that belongs to the mythical figure: Ulysses is, for him, an old person, that, after his adventures at Troy and his voyage, comes back to Ithaca. His island seems stranger to him, inhabited by people who don’t know him and who he doesn’t know. There isn’t a intimate relationship between the people and their king. The land is sterile, waste.

All the references to Ithaca alludes to London. London, as Ulysses’s reign, is infertile from the cultural point of view: during the period of industrialization, economy grows up producing richness for few (upper and middle class) and poverty for many but there were no values.

In the first stanza he tells about the conditions he found when he comes back: his wife, as himself, is old. He is a king but the people who he has to command doesn’t obeyed to him: he is useless, irrelevant even if he has the power to govern. The inhabitants are described using the adjective “savage”: they aren’t human beings, they are like animals that do only what’s important for their survive: hoard, sleep, feed, know not me. The last part of the sentence is particularly relevant: it consists of a deviation of the ordinary sintax to underline “me”. It might mean that they doesn’t know humanity, values, something beyond money and richness.

In the second stanza he sums up his life focusing on what it means to him: travels are everything for him, ha cannot rest; travels allows him to live his life. He is different from the walking dead that Eliot describes in the “burial of the death”, in the scene of the “unreal city”. He enjoyed, have suffered greatly, he has lived every single moment with the people who loves him or alone: there are no middle ways. He never stay together with a common people, who doesn’t know him, in the intimate meaning of the verb. 

He wanders around the sea and he sees and knows “cities of men”, place where all that now is happening in Ithaca is far away, where people are different from his people, but more similar to him: he calls them “ my peers” 

In the third stanza he tells about the way his travels had changed him: “I am a part of all that I have met”, he enrich himself exploring the word, looking for answers, searching and finding a meaning. But the knowledge is never enough: he would like to travel forever because there can’t be a rest in the evolving of time and history, he will never know everything. Every minute is important because if you want you can learn, discover something during it. Finally he compares knowledge to a sinking stars: bright but destined to move in eternity.

In the fourth stanza he recall the starting theme, with a modification. Now he speaks about his island referring to his son, Telemachus, who, after his death, will reign on it. He introduces his son gradually in the government of the island, with prudence: they are different, too much different from the rugged people.

In the fifth section he reflects on his old age referring to the vessel he uses in the travels. With the association of ideas he meditate on death that is not come, for the moment. “‘tis not too late to seek a newer world”, men cal always find something new if he wants to, and if he is interested in what is not only material and precious from the economical point of view: men have to look for values that enrich their soul, not their pocket.

In the last part he leaves once again, going towards the sunset, until death will come. He never abandon the way of knowledge to become a member of the rugged people that lives in his island. He wants to be different: he knows it isn0t an easy way, maybe dangerous that will bring joy but also pain but he doesn’t change his mind, he doesn’t retrograde. People like he is are “one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate but strong in will”. With these final lines he sums up all the messages that are in the text: men, during his life, has to live, to “strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”.