UlyssesFirst published in 1842, no alterations were made in it subsequently.This noble poem, which is said to have induced Sir Robert Peel to give Tennyson his pension, was written soon after Arthur Hallam’s death, presumably therefore in 1833. “It gave my feeling,” Tennyson said to his son, “about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything inIn Memoriam.” It is not theUlyssesof Homer, nor was it suggested by theOdyssey. The germ, the spirit and the sentiment of the poem are from the twenty-sixth canto of Dante’sInferno, where Ulysses in the Limbo of the Deceivers speaks from the flame which swathes him. I give a literal version of the passage:—“Neither fondness for my son nor reverence for my aged sire nor the due love which ought to have gladdened Penelope could conquer in me the ardour which I had to become experienced in the world and in human vice and worth. I put out into the deep open sea with but one ship and with that small company which had not deserted me.... I and my companions were old and tardy when we came to that narrow pass where Hercules assigned his landmarks. ‘O brothers,’ I said, ‘who through a hundred thousand dangers have reached the West deny not to this the brief vigil of your senses that remain, experience of the unpeopled world beyond the sun. Consider your origin, ye were not formed to live like Brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.... Night already saw the other pole with all its stars and ours so low that it rose not from the ocean floor’” (Inferno, xxvi., 94-126).But if the germ is here the expansion is Tennyson’s; he has added elaboration and symmetry, fine touches, magical images and magical diction. There is nothing in Dante which answers to—Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fadesFor ever and for ever when I move.orIt 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.Of these lines well does Carlyle say what so many will feel: “These lines do not make me weep, but there is in me what would till whole Lacrymatorics as I read”.It little profits that an idle king,By this still hearth, among these barren crags,Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and doleUnequal laws unto a savage race,That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.I cannot rest from travel: I will drinkLife to the lees: all times I have enjoy’dGreatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with thoseThat loved me, and alone; on shore, and whenThro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades[1]Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;For always roaming with a hungry heartMuch have I seen and known; cities of menAnd manners, climates, councils, governments,[2]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 fadesFor ever and for ever when I move.How dull it is to pause, to make an end,[3]To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on lifeWere all too little, and of one to meLittle remains: but every hour is savedFrom that eternal silence, something more,A bringer of new things; and vile it wereFor some three suns to store and hoard myself,And this gray spirit yearning in desireTo follow knowledge, like a sinking star,Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.This is my son, mine own Telemachus,[4]To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle—Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfilThis labour, by slow prudence to make mildA rugged people, and thro’ soft degreesSubdue them to the useful and the good.Most blameless is he, centred in the sphereOf common duties, decent not to failIn offices of tenderness, and payMeet 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 toil’d and wrought, and thought with me—That ever with a frolic welcome tookThe thunder and the sunshine, and opposedFree 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 deepMoans round with many voices. Come, my friends,’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.Push off, and sitting well in order smiteThe sounding furrows; for my purpose holdsTo sail beyond the sunset, and the bathsOf 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,[5]And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’We are not now that strength which in old daysMoved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;One equal temper of heroic hearts,Made weak by time and fate, but strong in willTo strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.[1]Virgil,Æn., i., 748, and iii., 516.[2]Odyssey, i., 1-4.[3]Cf. Shakespeare,Troilus and Cressida:—Perseverance, dear, my lord,Keeps honour bright: To have done, is to hangQuite out of fashion, like a rusty nailIn monumental mockery.[4]How admirably has Tennyson touched off the character of the Telemachus of theOdyssey.[5]The Happy Isles, theFortunatæ Insulæof the Romans and the αἱ τῶν Μακάρων νῆσοι of the Greeks, have been identified by geographers as those islands in the Atlantic off the west coast of Africa; some take them to mean the Canary Islands, the Madeira group and the Azores, while they may have included the Cape de Verde Islands as well. What seems certain is that these places with their soft delicious climate and lovely scenery gave the poets an idea of a happy abode for departed spirits, and so the conception of theElysian Fields. Theloci classicion these abodes are Homer, Odyssey, iv., 563seqq.:—ᾁλλά σ’ ες Ἠλύσιον πεδίον καὶ πέιρατα γαιήςἀθάνατοι πέμψουσιν, ὅθι ξανθὸς Ῥαδάμανθυςτῇ περ ῥηίστη βιοτὴ πέλει ἀνθρώποισιν,οὐ νιφετὸς, οὔτ’ ἄρ χειμὼν πολὺς, οὔτε ποτ’ ὄμβροςἀλλ’ άιεὶ Ζεφύροιο λιγὺ πνέιοντας ἀήταςὠκεανὸς ἀνιήσιν ἀναψύχειν ἀνθρώπους.[But the Immortals will convey thee to the Elysian plain and the world’s limits where is Rhadamanthus of the golden hair, where life is easiest for man; no snow is there, no nor no great storm, nor any rain, but always ocean sendeth forth the shrilly breezes of the West to cool and refresh men.], and Pindar,Olymp., ii., 178seqq., compared with the splendid fragment at the beginning of theDirges. Elysium was afterwards placed in the netherworld, as by Virgil. Thus, as so often the suggestion was from the facts of geography, the rest soon became an allegorical myth, and to attempt to identify and localise “the Happy Isles” is as great an absurdity as to attempt to identify and localise the island of Shakespeare’sTempest.
First published in 1842, no alterations were made in it subsequently.
This noble poem, which is said to have induced Sir Robert Peel to give Tennyson his pension, was written soon after Arthur Hallam’s death, presumably therefore in 1833. “It gave my feeling,” Tennyson said to his son, “about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything inIn Memoriam.” It is not theUlyssesof Homer, nor was it suggested by theOdyssey. The germ, the spirit and the sentiment of the poem are from the twenty-sixth canto of Dante’sInferno, where Ulysses in the Limbo of the Deceivers speaks from the flame which swathes him. I give a literal version of the passage:—
“Neither fondness for my son nor reverence for my aged sire nor the due love which ought to have gladdened Penelope could conquer in me the ardour which I had to become experienced in the world and in human vice and worth. I put out into the deep open sea with but one ship and with that small company which had not deserted me.... I and my companions were old and tardy when we came to that narrow pass where Hercules assigned his landmarks. ‘O brothers,’ I said, ‘who through a hundred thousand dangers have reached the West deny not to this the brief vigil of your senses that remain, experience of the unpeopled world beyond the sun. Consider your origin, ye were not formed to live like Brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.... Night already saw the other pole with all its stars and ours so low that it rose not from the ocean floor’” (Inferno, xxvi., 94-126).
But if the germ is here the expansion is Tennyson’s; he has added elaboration and symmetry, fine touches, magical images and magical diction. There is nothing in Dante which answers to—
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fadesFor ever and for ever when I move.
or
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.
Of these lines well does Carlyle say what so many will feel: “These lines do not make me weep, but there is in me what would till whole Lacrymatorics as I read”.
It little profits that an idle king,By this still hearth, among these barren crags,Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and doleUnequal laws unto a savage race,That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.I cannot rest from travel: I will drinkLife to the lees: all times I have enjoy’dGreatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with thoseThat loved me, and alone; on shore, and whenThro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades[1]Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;For always roaming with a hungry heartMuch have I seen and known; cities of menAnd manners, climates, councils, governments,[2]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 fadesFor ever and for ever when I move.How dull it is to pause, to make an end,[3]To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on lifeWere all too little, and of one to meLittle remains: but every hour is savedFrom that eternal silence, something more,A bringer of new things; and vile it wereFor some three suns to store and hoard myself,And this gray spirit yearning in desireTo follow knowledge, like a sinking star,Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.This is my son, mine own Telemachus,[4]To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle—Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfilThis labour, by slow prudence to make mildA rugged people, and thro’ soft degreesSubdue them to the useful and the good.Most blameless is he, centred in the sphereOf common duties, decent not to failIn offices of tenderness, and payMeet 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 toil’d and wrought, and thought with me—That ever with a frolic welcome tookThe thunder and the sunshine, and opposedFree 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 deepMoans round with many voices. Come, my friends,’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.Push off, and sitting well in order smiteThe sounding furrows; for my purpose holdsTo sail beyond the sunset, and the bathsOf 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,[5]And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’We are not now that strength which in old daysMoved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;One equal temper of heroic hearts,Made weak by time and fate, but strong in willTo strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
[1]Virgil,Æn., i., 748, and iii., 516.
[2]Odyssey, i., 1-4.
[3]Cf. Shakespeare,Troilus and Cressida:—Perseverance, dear, my lord,Keeps honour bright: To have done, is to hangQuite out of fashion, like a rusty nailIn monumental mockery.
[4]How admirably has Tennyson touched off the character of the Telemachus of theOdyssey.
[5]The Happy Isles, theFortunatæ Insulæof the Romans and the αἱ τῶν Μακάρων νῆσοι of the Greeks, have been identified by geographers as those islands in the Atlantic off the west coast of Africa; some take them to mean the Canary Islands, the Madeira group and the Azores, while they may have included the Cape de Verde Islands as well. What seems certain is that these places with their soft delicious climate and lovely scenery gave the poets an idea of a happy abode for departed spirits, and so the conception of theElysian Fields. Theloci classicion these abodes are Homer, Odyssey, iv., 563seqq.:—
ᾁλλά σ’ ες Ἠλύσιον πεδίον καὶ πέιρατα γαιήςἀθάνατοι πέμψουσιν, ὅθι ξανθὸς Ῥαδάμανθυςτῇ περ ῥηίστη βιοτὴ πέλει ἀνθρώποισιν,οὐ νιφετὸς, οὔτ’ ἄρ χειμὼν πολὺς, οὔτε ποτ’ ὄμβροςἀλλ’ άιεὶ Ζεφύροιο λιγὺ πνέιοντας ἀήταςὠκεανὸς ἀνιήσιν ἀναψύχειν ἀνθρώπους.
[But the Immortals will convey thee to the Elysian plain and the world’s limits where is Rhadamanthus of the golden hair, where life is easiest for man; no snow is there, no nor no great storm, nor any rain, but always ocean sendeth forth the shrilly breezes of the West to cool and refresh men.], and Pindar,Olymp., ii., 178seqq., compared with the splendid fragment at the beginning of theDirges. Elysium was afterwards placed in the netherworld, as by Virgil. Thus, as so often the suggestion was from the facts of geography, the rest soon became an allegorical myth, and to attempt to identify and localise “the Happy Isles” is as great an absurdity as to attempt to identify and localise the island of Shakespeare’sTempest.