Ulysses revisited

Ulysses and the Sirens by John William Waterhouse, 1891 (Google Arts & Culture)
Ulysses and the Sirens by John William Waterhouse, 1891 (Google Arts & Culture)

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match’d with an aged 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 enjoy’d

Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when

Thro’ 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 honour’d 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 wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades

Forever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

As tho’ 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 thro’ 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.

 

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Sometimes it is rewarding to revisit some of the memorable, old poems of English literature.  This one is “Ulysses” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, a famous dramatic monologue in blank verse.  “Ulysses”, written in 1833 and first published in 1842, is highly acclaimed among Victorian poems, and Tennyson (1809 -1892), among the most revered and popular English poets. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1850 (succeeding William Wordsworth), and served till 1893.

The most interesting thing about the poem is its subject, one of the great heroes from Greek mythology. In the dramatic monologue, Ulysses, also known as Odysseus, now old and retired, expresses his desire to return to the adventures of the sea. The story of his life and travels is told by the greatest known epic poet Homer, who wrote about him in The Iliad and The Odyssey. 

Ulysses (Odysseus) was the king of Ithaca in Greece, one of the great heroes – certainly the craftiest, the most cunning – of the Trojan War.  In The Iliad, he was one of the leaders of the Greek army who went to war in the city state of Troy. He left behind his young wife Penelope and their baby son, Telemachus. He was away for ten years before, through a clever and deceitful plan of his, Troy was defeated.  In The Odyssey, he then set off for home, but it took him another ten years to get there, during which time he was made to wander at sea by the god of the sea Poseidon as punishment. The god, who was a supporter of Troy, was angry with Ulysses because of the trick he played to engineer the victory for Greece. Eventually, after several dangerous, sometimes life-threatening adventures, he arrived home to rejoin his queen and son who had waited faithfully for him for 20 years.

Tennyson’s poem revisits Ulysses, several years after his return. The poem creates a situation in which the hero-king is now old, but restless and tired of being so long in one place. He begins to feel an urgent need to return to the sea and travel the world again. He is bored, unappreciative of his kingdom and its people, and even out of patience with his very faithful wife. He longs to return to the adventures, to be challenged, to be active and to conquer.

Throughout Homer, readers may sometimes be a bit ambivalent towards this legendary hero, wondering whether he is saviour or villain. His deeds are heroic, but he often uses craft and trickery, he is amoral and ruthless. The poem tests the reader’s sympathy where he says, “matched with an aged wife I mete and dole unequal laws unto a savage race”. Is that all he thinks of the people he rules over? What is more, is that how he regards his wife, who in very testing circumstances remained loyal and true, waiting for his return for 20 years when everyone else had given him up as dead? In fact, the story of Penelope is one of the great love stories of Greek mythology; she is an archetypal symbol of chastity and loyalty, admired even by the Romans, whose poets look upon her as a model of love and honour in their works.

Homer tells many stories about her and her determination to remain chaste. The love story is worth repeating. During her husband’s absence, Penelope, a beautiful queen, had several suitors whom she consistently rebuffed. They became increasingly persistent and overbearing as they tried to persuade her that the king was dead, and she should succumb. She privately refused, but announced that she accepted their reason. She then declared that she would weave a shroud for her husband and as soon as it was done, she would be ready to accept one of the aggressive suitors.  The legendary tale relates how she deceived them all. She was seen working and weaving all day, but in the secrecy of night she unravelled all the work, restarted it by day, only to unravel it again by night.

Penelope demonstrated almost as much guile and trickery as her artful husband. In the very end, she prevails and as soon as Ulysses reclaims her as his wife, he uses his enchanted bow to slaughter the several competing suitors in one of the bloodiest and vividly violent sequences described by Homer. Ulysses’ vengeful anger and the brutal carnage are unforgettable. 

His own adventures away from home are even more intriguing. He lives by his wits and often has to think quickly to save his life and the lives of his crewmen. These include his escape in Anansi fashion from the Cyclops, and his romance with the beautiful sorceress and temptress Circe, who turns his crewmen into pigs, but who eventually helps him to escape the waiting clutches of the Sirens. Many and exciting were his exploits and the use of his wits to negotiate his survival as narrated by Homer.

Homer’s Ulysses inspired many other works of art and writers, including Dante of the early Renaissance, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Derek Walcott. Shakespeare explores his subterfuge in the play Troilus and Cressida, while Walcott transforms him into Anansi in the play The Odyssey.