Published 1842. Written 20 Oct.. 1833 (dated, Heath MS), soon after T. heard the news of Arthur Hallam’s death. T. made two slightly different comments. First, ‘The poem was written soon after Arthur Hallam’s death, and it gives the feeling [gave my feeling Mem. i 196] about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam’ (Eversley). Second, comparing In Memoriam, ‘There is more about myself in Ulysses, which was written under the sense of loss and that all had gone by, but that still life must be fought out to the end. It was more written with the feeling of his loss upon me than many poems in In Memoriam’ (to James Knowles, Nineteenth Century xxxiii (1893) 182). For T.’s other attempts at this date to find solace and understanding in a classical figure, see Tithonus (p. 583), which he said was intended as a ‘pendant’ to Ulysses, and Tiresias (I 622).
The text in Heath MS is virtually that of 1842; H.Nbk 16 is earlier. T.Nbk 22 is later than both. It breaks off with l. 49 (then stubs). All variants are below. J. M. Kemble sent it to W. B. Donne (the poem dated 20 Oct. 1833) in March – April 1834, with the comment: ‘I will fill up my paper with a grand thing of Alfred’s, unfinished though it be.’ Kemble’s text is that of Heath MS, except for two slips.
Sources. T. specifies Odyssey xi 100–37, and Dante’s Inferno xxvi 90 ff. Tiresias speaks, Odyssey xi 112–37: ‘Late shalt thou come home and in evil case, after losing all thy comrades, in a ship that is another’s, and thou shalt find woes in thy house - proud men that devour thy livelihood, wooing thy godlike wife, and offering wooers’ gifts. Yet verily on their violent deeds shalt thou take vengeance when thou comest. But when thou hast slain the wooers in thy halls, whether by guile or openly with the sharp sword, then do thou go forth, taking a shapely oar, until thou comest to men that know naught of… ships…. And death shall come to thee thyself far from the sea [possibly ‘from out of the sea’], a death so gentle, that shall lay thee low when thou art overcome with sleek old age, and thy people shall dwell in prosperity around thee.’ On this ‘mysterious voyage’, H.T. comments: ‘This is elaborated by the author of the Telegoneia. My father, like Eugammon, takes up the story of further wanderings at the end of the Odyssey. Ulysses has lived in Ithaca for a long while before the craving for fresh travel seizes him. The comrades he addresses are of the same heroic mould as his old comrades.’ The last sentence is meant to meet the objection that Ulysses’ companions were dead. In a note H.T. added: ‘Perhaps the Odyssey has not been strictly adhered to, and some of the old comrades may be still left.’
Dante is the more important source. T. probably used H. F. Cary’s translation (1805); there is a copy at Lincoln. (There is also a copy of Henry Boyd’s translation.) E. H. Duncan argues that the translations by Boyd (1785), Cary, and perhaps Nathaniel Howard (1807) ‘may be at least as important as the original’ (Essays in Memory of Christine Burleson, ed. T. G. Burton, 1969). R. Pattison notes, though, that T. ‘owned at least eleven copies of Dante’, and that his ‘favourite’ was in Italian, 1818–19 (Tennyson and Tradition, 1979, p. 167). Ulysses speaks, xxvi 90–124 (Cary):
When I escap’d
From Circe, who beyond a circling year
Had held me near Caieta, by her charms,
Ere thus Eneas yet had nam’d the shore,
Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence
Of my old father, nor return of love,
That should have crown’d Penelope with joy,
Could overcome in me the zeal I had
T’ explore the world, and search the ways of life,
Man’s evil and his virtue. Forth I sail’d
Into the deep illimitable main,
With but one bark, and the small faithful band
That yet cleav’d to me. As Iberia far,
Far as Marocco either shore I saw,
And the Sardinian and each isle beside
Which round that ocean bathes. Tardy with age
Were I and my companions, when we came
To the strait pass, where Hercules ordain’d
The bound’ries not to be o’erstepp’d by man.
The walls of Seville to my right I left,
On the’ other hand already Ceuta past.
‘O brothers!’ I began, ‘who to the west
‘Through perils without number now have reach’d,
To this the short remaining watch, that yet
‘Our senses have to wake, refuse not proof
‘Of the unpeopled world, following the track
‘Of Phoebus. Call to mind from whence ye sprang:
‘Ye were not form’d to live the life of brutes,
‘But virtue to pursue and knowledge high.’
With these few words I sharpen’d for the voyage
The mind of my associates, that I then
Could scarcely have withheld them. To the dawn
Our poop we turn’d…
Ulysses then describes the last and fatal voyage. It has been much discussed whether or not we are to find T.’s Ulysses altogether noble; there is a scrupulous account of the arguments by J. Pettigrew, Victorian Poetry i (1963) 27–45. See also the subsequent articles by L. K. Hughes, VP xvii (1979) 192–203, and L. M. Findlay, VP xix (1981), 139–49; and, on the significance of the Homeric and Dantesque backgrounds, T. Robbins, VP xi (1973) 177–93. T. P. Adler (TRB ii, 1974, 128– 30) suggests as a further source Samuel Daniel’s Ulysses and the Siren (it is in Percy’s Reliques; Somersby, Lincoln). B. J. Leggett (Tennessee Studies in Literature xv, 1970, 143–59) argues that Byron’s influence is almost as pervasive as Dante’s; particularly Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III xlii–xlv, a significant source for theme, imagery and language. Cp. T.’s ll. 22–4, and his larger context, with III xliv:
Their breath is agitation, and their life
A storm whereon they ride, to sink at last,
And yet so nursed and bigoted to strife,
That should their days, surviving perils past,
Melt to calm twilight, they feel overcast
With sorrow and supineness, and so die;
Even as a flame unfed, which runs to waste
With its own flickering, or a sword laid by,
Which eats into itself, and rusts ingloriously.
(For a parallel in Byron earlier noted, see l. 18n.)
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle –
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads – you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
[1833. Tithon – see p. 992]
¶217. 2. still] dull H.MS 1st reading.
3. an agèd wife: Duncan (see headnote) compares Boyd’s ‘agèd sire’ and Howard’s ‘an aged sire’.
4. Unequal: not ‘unjust’, but ‘not affecting all in the same manner or degree’, a primitive state of law consequent upon the Ithacans’ being ‘a savage race’.
5. not me] me not H.MS. Cp. Hamlet IV iv 33–9, which not only echoes ‘sleep and feed’, but is also apt to the theme of the poem: ‘What is a man,/If his chief good and market of his time/Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more:/Sure he that made us with such large discourse,/Looking before and after, gave us not/That capability and god-like reason/To fust in us unused.’
6–9] Much have I suffered both on shore and when H.MS.
6–7. J. Pettigrew (see headnote) compares Macbeth II iii 94–5: ‘The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees/Is left this vault to brag of’.
10. scudding drifts: Pleiadum choro/scindente nubes (Horace, Odes IV xiv 21–2). T. quotes pluviasque Hyadas (Aeneid i 744); the rising of these stars was thought to bring storm.
10–11. Cp. Shelley, Revolt of Islam III xxxii 3–4: ‘the starry giant dips/His zone in the dim sea’.
11. Vext: cp. The Tempest I ii 229: ‘the still-vexed Bermoothes’; Paradise Lost i 305–6: ‘with fierce Winds Orion arm’d/Hath vext the Red-Sea Coast’; and Pope’s Iliad iii 5–6: ‘When inclement Winters vex the plain/With piercing frosts, or thick-descending rain.’ This sense is common in Shelley.
12] Not H.MS, Heath MS, T.MS. J. C. Maxwell (private communication) suggests the influence of avido… pectore in Cicero’s free version of the song of the Sirens, De Finibus V xviii 49.
13. and], much H.MS.
13–14. Odyssey i 3–5: πολλω̑ν δ’ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄίστεα καὶ νóον ἔγνω, / πολλὰ, δ’ ὅ γ’ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὅ ν κατὰ θυµόν. (‘Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned, aye, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea’.) Hence Horace on Ulysses, Epistles I ii 19–20: qui… multorum providus urbes/et mores hominum inspexit.
17. windy Troy: Homer’s Προτὶ ῎Ιλιον ἠνεµóεσσαν.
18] Not H.MS. T. cites Aeneas’s account of his experiences, Aeneid ii 5–6: quaeque ipse miserrima vidi/et quorum pars magna fui. Cp. Byron, Childe Harold III lxxii 1–2: ‘I live not in myself, but I become/Portion of that around me’. Byron’s passage has lines relevant to Ulysses (lxx 6–9, lxxv 1–2): ‘on the sea/The boldest steer but where their ports invite –/But there are wanderers o’er Eternity,/Whose bark drives on and on, and anchored ne’er shall be…/Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part/Of me and of my Soul.’
19. wherethrough] through which MSS. Duncan (see headnote) says that the ‘arch’ is not apparently indebted to Dante, and notes Boyd: ‘I circled round the Celtiberian strand’ (xvii 4).
19–21. Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer (1861) iii, commented on these lines: ‘It is no blame to their rhythm, which belongs to another order of movement than Homer’s, but it is true that these three lines by themselves take up nearly as much time as a whole book of the Iliad ’.
20–2] Gleams the untravelled world: how dull it is H.MS. J. Pettigrew compares ‘the unpeopled world’, Cary’s Dante, Inf. xxvi 117. M. Alexander compares Hamlet III i 79–80: ‘The undiscovered country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns’.
23. Cp. Ulysses’s words, Troilus and Cressida III iii 150–3: ‘Perseverance, dear my lord,/Keeps honour bright: to have done, is to hang/Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail/In monumental mockery.’ T. later cited this speech as one of ‘the noblest things’ in Shakespeare (Tennyson and His Friends, p. 265). D. Bush, MLR xxxviii (1943) 38, compares Hamlet IV iv 39 (see l. 5n ). J. J. M. Tobin (TRB iii, 1979, 120–1) suggests that a great many of the words of the scene have a place in the poem, and that the play ‘gives a richer understanding of the themes of withdrawal and second chance in the poem.’
24] As though to live were all the end of life. H.MS 1st reading; As though to live were life. Little of life H.MS. J. H. Buckley (p. 267) quotes ‘Would I could pile fresh life on life’, in Life, a poem on mortality beginning ‘Why suffers human life so soon eclipse’ (I 321).
25] Not H.MS; Were all too little. Of one life to me Heath MS 1st reading, T.MS.
26] Little of life H.MS 1st reading, deleted; Remains, but every hour is something more H.MS. 27 ] Not H.MS.
28. vile it were ] this were vile H. MS.
29. store and hoard ] hoard and save H.MS.
30–2. Leggett (see headnote) compares Childe Harold III xlii: ‘There is a fire/And motion of the Soul which will not dwell/In its own narrow being, but aspire/Beyond the fitting medium of desire’.
30. gray spirit ] old heart yet H.MS, Heath MS 1st reading, T.MS 1st reading. F. J. Rowe and W. T. Webb, in their Selections (1888), described the syntax as ‘absolute case’; T. wrote: ‘No. The accusative after store etc.’ (Lincoln). (H. T. confusingly notes: ‘accusative absolute’.)
31–2. To be found verbatim in a draft (1833) of Tiresias, where they formed part of the opening lines (T.Nbk 15). Cp. The Lover’s Tale i 50 ^ 1: ‘O’er long loud waters, like a sinking star’. Cary’s Dante has ‘following the track / Of Phoebus’, and ‘virtue to pursue and knowledge high’ (see headnote). Duncan compares Boyd’s translation: ‘I saw the sinking barriers of the west’ (xviii 2), and ‘Till ev’ry well-known star beneath the deep/Declin’d the radiant head’ (xx 2–3, different from Dante).
33–42] Added to H.MS.
33. mine own ] my child H.MS.
39. Most] Added in T.MS.
39–40] Decent and blameless is he, not to fail H.MS deleted but without the revision. decent: having a sense of what is fitting. Culler (pp. 95–6) notes the connotations ‘of ancient political wisdom, of Greek and Roman discussions of justice and the state’, in Ulysses’ terms here in ll. 33–43.
42. Meet ] Just H.MS.
43] Not H.MS, Heath MS; … gone. That work is his T.MS 1st reading; He works his work. I mine. All this is just. T.MS.
44. the vessel ] yon vessel H.MS 1st reading.
45. :There gloom ] Beyond H.MS.
47–9] My mariners, though I and you are old H.MS.
48– 9] The thunder and the sunshine – we are old; Heath MS, T.MS 1st reading. 51 ^ 2 ] Not all unworthy of heroic souls added as H.MS 1st reading; [l. 53] H.MS.
53] See previous note .
54–7] Not H.MS.
55. D. Bush, Major British Writers (1959) ii 396, remarks that ‘Homeric voyages commonly begin in the evening; here the accent is on the evening of life.’ Compare Cary’s Dante: ‘To the dawn/Our poop we turn’d’, where Ulysses’ account of his fatal voyage goes on to mention the moon and the stars.
57. J. J. M. Tobin compares tellure nova, Horace’s Odes I vii 25–31, Teucer’s address to his comrades: ‘Teucer is struggling to overcome the despair occasioned by a double loss: that of Ajax his (half-)brother by death in battle and of Telamon his father by rejection. This double loss brings Teucer closer even than Ulysses to Tennyson who had lost Hallam, his more than brother, in 1833 and his troubled and troubling father in 1831’ (Notes & Queries ccxxi, 1976, 395).
58–9. Translating, as T. noted, a Homeric commonplace: ἑξη̑ς δ’ἑζόµενοι πολιὴν ἅλα τύπτον ἑρετµοι̑ς (Odyssey iv 580 etc).
59. my… holds ] I purpose now H.MS 1st reading .
60–1. Adapting Odyssey v 270– 5:
αὐτἀρ ὁ πηδαλίῳ ἰθύνετο τεχνηέντως / ἥµενος, οὐδέ οἱ ὕπνος ἐπὶ βλεφάροισιν ἔπιπτεν / Πληιάδας τ’ ἐσορω̑ντι καὶ ὀψὲ δύοντα Βοώτην / ῎Αρκτον θ’, ἣν καὶ ῎Αµαξαν ἐπίκλησιν καλέουσιν. / ἥ τ’ αὐτου̑ στρέφεται καί τ’’Ωρίωνα δοκεύει, / οἴη δ’ ἄµµορός ἐστι λοετρω̑ν ᾽Ωκεανοι̑ο. (Odysseus ‘watched the Pleiads, and late-setting Bootes, and the Bear, which men also call the Wain, which ever circles where it is and watches Orion, and alone has no part in the baths of Ocean.’)
62– 5] Not H.MS.
63. The Isles of the Blest were thought to lie beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), and it is beyond the Pillars that Dante’s Ulysses urges his companions to sail with him.
65–6. Leggett compares Childe Harold III vii: ‘’Tis too late!/Yet am I changed; though still enough the same/In strength to bear what Time cannot abate’. (Cp. l. 57 above.)
66. that… days ] the men that in one night H.MS 1st reading; that strength that [which Heath MS ] in one night H.MS, Heath MS.
66– 9. Recalling Hallam’s To J.M.G. [James Milnes Gaskell], written May 1829 and printed 1830 (Motter, p. 47): ‘We are not as we were…/We are not as we were: our silent tombs/Shall have us not, till we have drunk our fill/Of a new glorious joy, restoring heart and will!’ Cp. ll. 6–7 above.
67. Moved… heaven ] Swathed Troy with flame H.MS, Heath MS.
68] Not H.MS.