Nostalgia, Regret, and Futility – Exploring the Tone and Language of Tennyson’s “Ulysses"

“How dull it is to pause, to make an end / To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!” (22-23) Thus speaks the aged Greek hero in Tennyson’s famous poem “Ulysses” as the king contemplates the futility of life, bemoaning the passing of his youth. Although widely celebrated as a majestic piece that exhorts us to press onward in the face of grief, “Ulysses” contains yet a deeper meaning that Tennyson suggests using both the poem’s language and its tone – underneath the surface, “Ulysses” is a lament that muses with regret upon the vanity of a life wasted chasing after adventure. As Charles C. Walcutt of Michigan State Normal College writes, “The voice which speaks is not that of a trumpet, clear-throated and vigorous; it is the mournful sighing of strings” (Walcutt, 1946). Tennyson conveys his theme of regret using the following literary tools – tone and word choice.

             Tone is a powerful element of “Ulysses” – Tennyson portrays the attitudes and overall character of his poem using the aged warrior’s expression of feeling. Throughout its development, the hero of “Ulysses” articulates a broad range of emotions, from his initial frustrated reflections on his current situation, to his final determination to experience one last adventure before death – from “Matched 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” (3-6) to “ ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world…To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars, until I die” (56-61)

In the opening lines of “Ulysses,” Tennyson paints his readers a picture of an elderly Greek king sitting by an empty fireplace, lamenting the monotony of his current life. This emotion of frustration however quickly gives way to nostalgia, as Ulysses muses fondly upon his past adventures:

            Much have I seen and known, - cities of men

            And manners, climates, councils, governments,

            Myself not least, but honored of them all, -

            And drink delight of battle with my peers,

            Far on the singing plains of windy Troy. (13-17)

Then Ulysses turns to reflecting upon his son Telemachus and upon the differences between their characters – he observes that Telemachus seems contented with his lot governing the people of Ithaca, while Ulysses still feels restlessness in his own heart; “He works his work, I mine” (43). Ulysses next passes from thoughts of his son to contemplations of death and old age. His attitude towards death is similar to that of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes: “This also is vanity. For there is no more remembrance of the wise than of the fool forever, since all that now is will be forgotten in the days to come. And how does a wise man die? As the fool!” (Ecc. 2:15-16). Likewise Ulysses exclaims, “As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life / Were all too little, and of one to me” (24-25), implying that just because he breathes doesn’t mean he feels alive – in fact, he feels his death drawing near, and the thought that “Death closes all” (51) fills him with a growing sense of despair. Ulysses has come to the same realization as the Preacher – no matter how many great deeds he’s accomplished during his lifetime, death is the inevitable end of all men. There is no escape from mortality.

The last emotion expressed by Ulysses in this poem is one of renewed, grim, and almost reckless determination to experience one final adventure before death overtakes him: “Come, my friends, / ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world” (56-57). Tennyson enforces the despairing tone of his poem with this dramatic conclusion, in which Ulysses exhorts his fellow-mariners to join him once more on a sea-voyage. He cries,

            Tho’ much is taken much abides; and tho’

            We are not now that strength which in old days

            Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are (65-67)

The reader is never told whether or not Ulysses actually carries out his plan for a journey – he may have simply been dreaming of one last glorious adventure before death. As Walcutt states, “The effect of the poem is nearer to being an evocation of the state of mind of an aged warrior who dreams of former glory than it is to being the actual beginning of a new heroic quest” (Walcutt, 1946). The 16^th century Italian poet Dante describes Ulysses’ final journey in his poem The Inferno, and according to Dante’s version, Ulysses and his crew perish a watery death because of the wrath of Zeus: “The poop rose and the bow went down / till the sea closed over us and the light was gone” (130-131). Whether or not Ulysses actually set out on this final adventure and was lost at sea is not revealed in Tennyson’s text, but the expression of Ulysses’ emotion is the same – he senses the futility of his life and is frustrated with the impotence of old age. His solution is to turn to glorious visions of battles and adventures, which he thinks will bring him the happiness he lacks.

            Throughout the poem “Ulysses,” the aged Greek warrior gives voice to a wide array of emotions, ranging from discontentment to nostalgia to hopelessness to grim determination. Tennyson sets the tone of his poem through this expression of attitude, but he also conveys the poem’s deeper themes using word choice and language. There are two specific passages in “Ulysses” where Tennyson’s word choice particularly strengthens the sense of futility and hopelessness of this poem.

            First of all, Tennyson employs the use of metaphor when describing Ulysses’ feelings of helplessness. Ulysses compares himself to an old sword that has seen great deeds in battle but now sits abandoned and rusty with disuse (22-23) and uses the adjectives “dull”, “unburnish’d”, and “gray” to describe his sense of feebleness and age (23-30). He yearns “to follow knowledge like a sinking star” (31). Ulysses’ language and choice of adjectives in this particular passage strengthen the poem’s sense of regret and its message of life’s meaninglessness.

            Towards the end of the poem, Tennyson once again employs an implied metaphor when his hero describes the ending of the day, signifying the closing of his life:

                        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. (54-57)

Ulysses realizes that, like the long day waning, his life is also drawing to a close. This realization seems almost to frighten him, and he grasps for comfort at the only thing he knows and loves – adventure. Instead of examining himself and apprehending the futility of the things he has spend his life chasing after, his conclusion is that, though “death closes all; but something ere the end, / Some work of noble note, may yet be done, / Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods” (51-53).

         

  The ultimate message of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” is a deep and powerful one, similar to the final conclusion of Ecclesiastes; “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man’s all” (Ecc. 12:13). The pursuit of anything else in place of God – whether it be money, power, fame, glory in battle, or adventure – is fruitless and devoid of meaning. A life wasted chasing after these things is one that will end in regret and despair, as Tennyson’s Ulysses comes to partially realize. Tennyson conveys this message using his hero’s attitudes, expression of feeling, and choice of language – without God, our lives are meaningless. Without God, we have nothing to turn to when our end draws near and we begin, like Ulysses, to sense the futility of our life’s pursuits. And without God, the prospect of death is a frightening one indeed.

Sources

Dante, A. (2003). The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso. (J. Ciardi, Trans.) New York, New York: New American Library.

Lord Tennyson, A. (1950). Ulysses. In P. R. Lieder, R. M. Lovett, & R. K. Root (Eds.), British Poetry and Prose (Third ed., Vol. 2, pp. 445-446). Cambridge, MA, United States: The Riverside Press.

Walcutt, C. C. (1946). TENNYSON, Ulysses. Explicator , IV (28), 3.

My most recent posts are the products of my freshman college assignments - in lit. class this week we had to analyze a particular poem's themes and the poet's methods of communicating those themes. I was pretty excited when I saw that Tennyson was one of the choices. (Because of reasons.) I hope it was as enjoyable to read as it was enjoyable to write. 

I have one more big drama paper due which I would like to share as well... and then I promise I will stop posting my college assignments on my blog. (Maybe.)

Tidbit from Tennyson for a Melancholy Day

I never thought of happy memories as being sad until the people giving them significance were taken away. Now "the days that are no more" and the reminders of them are painful. Yet, if I could go back in time, would I do without them? I think not, for as Tennyson points out in another poem; "I hold it true whate'er befall, I feel it when I sorrow most - 'tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." 

                                                                  
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather in the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

   Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

   Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

   Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

An Argument for the Awesomeness of Tennyson

                                                                            

                    “I hold it true, whate'er befall;

                    “I feel it when I sorrow most;

                  “ ‘Tis better to have loved and lost

                    "Than never to have loved at all."

Everyone has heard the latter part of this stanza at least once in their lifetime, but not everyone knows who penned these famous words about love and loss. The author was Alfred “Eccentric” Lord Tennyson, one of the greatest poets who ever lived, and certainly the greatest poet of his time.

Alfred was born in England, the fourth of twelve children, in 1809, the same year in which Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were also born. When he was eighteen in 1827 he left to study at Cambridge, where he became part of a literary group called the “Apostles”. He toured Europe with his best friend Hallam, who later became engaged to Alfred’s sister Emily. In 1833 Alfred went back home, no longer able to afford college tuition, and it was there that he learned that Hallam had died suddenly of fever while travelling abroad. His terrible grief at his friend’s death influenced much of his later poetry, especially the great elegy “In Memoriam.”

In 1850 William Wordsworth, Britain’s Poet Laureate, died, and Tennyson was named to take his place. He married Emily Sellwood, whom he had loved since 1836, and they moved in 1853 to a country house on the Isle of Wight where they raised two sons named Hallam and Lionel. Later in life Tennyson continued to write and gain popularity, and his poetry began to follow a narrative style. In 1884 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert granted Alfred a baronetcy. In 1892 he died at the age of 83 from heart failure and was buried in Westminster Abby. 

Although Tennyson was popular in his own day, his successors the Edwardians and Georgians of the early 1900s often mocked and ridiculed him, accusing him of escapism in his themes of knights, Camelot, and chivalry. Today, however, many critics consider him the greatest poet of the Victorian age. From Milton to Tennyson there was no poet combining in his person all the skills of expressing detail, love and reverence for God, optimism, and penetrating introspection with uniqueness, nor has there been one since Tennyson. To the critics, four predominant poetic traits make Alfred Lord Tennyson the greatest poet of the Victorians – to me, they make him one of the greatest poets in the history of language. These are: his skill in portraying details such as color, how he stands out from the other Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Keats, the method by which his poems culminate in optimism and hope in God, and, most importantly, his belief in and reverence for God.

 One of Tennyson’s most prevailing characteristics is his ability to convey color to the mind’s eye of the reader. For example, in “The Lady of Shalott”, Sir Lancelot’s attire is described in rich detail: “All in the blue unclouded weather / Thick-jewell’d shone the saddle-leather / The helmet and the helmet-feather / Burn’d like one burning flame together / As he rode down to Camelot. / As often thro’ the purple night / Below the starry clusters bright / Some bearded meteor, trailing light / Moves over still Shalott. / His broad clear brow in sunlight glow’d / On burnish’d hooves his war-horse trode / From underneath his helmet flow’d / His coal-black curls as on he rode / As he rode down to Camelot.”

Tennyson learned much of this sense of imagery from Keats, but his portrayals are vivid rather than vague, his colors brilliant in imagination rather than soft and fanciful. In “Morte d’Arthur”, Excalibur's hilt "twinkled with diamond sparks, / Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth-work / Of subtlest jewelry.” Tennyson was famous for these passages of sparkling color and poetic artistry and it is one of the strongest points of his poetry. As an early twentieth century critic praises this ability; “His appreciation for sensuous beauty, especially color, is acute…his descriptions are magnificently beautiful, often with much detail…Add the truth and tenderness of his emotion, and it results that he is one of the finest and most moving of lyric poets.” (Alfred Tennyson from A History of English Literature, by Robert Huntington Fletcher, 1918)

Another one of Tennyson’s greatest assets was his singularity among all of the other Romantic poets, including Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. He stands alone in many of his themes, motifs, and symbols, as well as his modes of expression and ideals. Unlike the other Romantics, who viewed nature as a sort of thing to be worshipped, Tennyson put nature into its proper perspective as a medium expressing and pointing the way towards the higher Creator Being. Some of his predominant themes are, the reconciliation of religion and science, the virtues of perseverance and optimism, and the glory of England, while some of Keats’ prevailing themes consist of the inevitability of death and the worship of beauty in nature, (“Beauty is truth, and truth, beauty.”) Wordsworth mourned the passing of England’s glory and Coleridge is notorious for a certain bizarre use of language and remoteness from reality –these characteristically Romantic traits contrast Tennyson’s reverence for England and for the importance of accurate scientific detail in his poetry. Undoubtedly Tennyson was influenced by his Romantic predecessors, but he veered from their path in numerous ways, and became the father of Victorian poetry in so doing.

   Out of Tennyson’s poetic themes, extolling the virtues of optimism is one of the greatest and most unique – after his best friend’s death he struggled through a time of intense despair, which he eventually overcame. Many of his poems exemplify this struggle with despair and hope, culminating in the ultimate victory of optimism over depression, and the realization of the need to carry on trusting in God. This need for perseverance is best expressed in the works “Ulysses” and “In Memoriam,” but it also appears in “The Lotos Eaters”, “The Lady of Shalott”, and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” The latter two glorify characters who embrace their destinies in the face of death.

The ideas of Tennyson’s poetry are noble, yet conservative, expressing the Victorian ideals of his time. Instead of becoming confused and straying from religion because of the scientific discoveries of his time, as so many Christians did, he used his poetry to reconcile this newly discovered science with God.

God is essentially the optimism of Tennyson’s poetry. It is best expressed in his long “In Memoriam”, a series of short poems woven together to create an elegy to his dead friend, Arthur Hallam. It begins as a tribute to the “Strong Son of God”, and folds out into the argument that, though man, never having seen God’s face, has no proof of His existence, he can still reach God through faith. Tennyson attributes the sun and moon to God, acknowledging Him as the creator of life and death. The Son of God Tennyson portrays as both human and divine – man controls his own will, but the Son of God has also predestined each man for a purpose. The speaker in “In Memoriam” expresses the hope that “knowledge [of God will] grow from more to more” though this knowledge should be combined with a reverence for God’s incalculable wisdom. The speaker also repeatedly asks that God would forgive him for his grief for “Thy creature, whom I found so fair.” Yet Tennyson concludes the poem with the hope that his best friend lives on in a better and higher World.

 “In Memoriam” is seen as the ultimate expression of Tennyson’s belief in God; “In religion, his inherited belief, rooted in his deepest fibers, early found itself confronted by the discoveries of modern science, which at first seemed to him to proclaim that the universe is much what it seemed to the young Carlyle, a remorseless monster, 'red in tooth and claw,' scarcely thinkable as the work of a Christian God who cares for man. Tennyson was too sincere to evade the issue, and after years of inner struggle he arrived at a positive faith in the central principles of Christianity.” (Alfred Tennyson from A History of English Literature, by Robert Huntington Fletcher, 1918

Thus Tennyson stands alone on a pedestal of greatness, for though the Romantic Keats and Wordsworth had genius, they did not have belief in God, and their genius was misplaced worshipping ideas such as Nature and Innocence. Though many more modern poets following Tennyson have used their poetry and genius to glorify God, they have not expressed their ideals as exquisitely, nor with as much skill, as Tennyson has done. His vivid and beautiful use of the English language combined with the wide variety of  poetic forms he mastered, such as lyrics, ballads, “descriptive poems, sentimental reveries, and idyls; long narratives, in which he displays perfect narrative skill; delightfully realistic character-sketches, some of them in dialect; dramas; and meditative poems, long and short, on religious, ethical, and social questions”, (Alfred Tennyson from A History of English Literature, by Robert Huntington Fletcher, 1918) place him among the great geniuses of literature. Alternatively, his departure from the accepted and usual themes and ideals of these geniuses set him apart into his own category of greatness, reserved only for those masters who gave glory to their Giver for their mastery.

To Autumn

This ode was written by John Keats, an English romantic poet. "Ode to Autumn" is known as the most simple of Keats' odes, depicting the features of fall in quiet, poetic terms. 
Keats was born in 1795 and died young from tuberculosis in 1821. He was only twenty-six years old. 

                          SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
2. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
3. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.