ULYSSES - TENNYSON

The poet's method

The form of the poem The poem is written in the iambic

pentameter line familiar from the plays of Shakespeare.

The lines are not rhymed at the end, and we call this blank verse.

Tennyson is the most fluent of writers and he is comfortable with end-stopped and run-on lines.

Rhetoric The poem uses several tricks of

rhetoric - to make speaking memorable and persuasive. We find antithesis (contrasting phrases) in:

"I cannot rest from travel: I will drink/Life to the lees" or in

"to rust unburnished, not to shine in use".

Rhetoric

"...that which we are, we are." Ulysses' manner of speaking here

often recalls the rhetoric of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost.

Imagery Metaphor and simile abound in the

poem: experience is an arch, inactivity is

like rusting action is like burnishing (polishing;

a very apt image as it suggests the warriors' armour that is burnished for use, or left to rust)

Imagery The poem is also decorated with lines one

can take out of their context, and use almost as proverbs:

"I am a part of all that I have met..." "...all experience is an arch..." "How dull it is to pause, to make an end..." Death closes all..." "'Tis not too late to seek a newer world..."

Imagery Ulysses' spirit is "gray" and yearns with

desire to "follow knowledge like a sinking star/Beyond the utmost bound of human thought"

a very complex series of images - try to visualise them, and you will realise this.

How many more images can you find, what do they mean, and how do they work?

Ambiguity and double meanings Ulysses would not know of the open ocean

beyond the great sea (which we call the Mediterranean) - nor that there is land to the west.

And no Greek ship, had it passed into the Atlantic, could safely have reached America.

But Tennyson (like his readers), of course, does know there is land here, and that the voyage is possible, if dangerous.

Ambiguity and double meanings

Ulysses wonders if he may find again the great hero, Achilles, whom he has not seen, since his death when Troy fell.

Many readers think that Tennyson identifies "the great Achilles" with his own lost friend, Arthur Hallam

Ulysses - Method

Taken from http://www.shunsley.eril.net/armoore/anthology/pre1914poetry.htm#ulysses