Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.
But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,
2. The suitors of Penelope, Odysseus's wife; dur- Homer. 'Amaranth': a legendary unfading flower, ing his long absence they have settled themselves 4. A plant resembling a thistle. Its leaves were the as guests in his hall as they pressure her to remarry. model for ornaments on Corinthian columns. 3. A flower with magical properties mentioned by
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ULYSSES / 1123
Like a tale of little meaning though the words are strong;
165 Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,
Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;
Till they perish and they suffer?some, 'tis whispered?down in hell
Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,
170 Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.5 Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore Than labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.
1832, 1842
Ulysses1
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws2 unto a savage race,
5 That hoard, and sleep, and feed,3 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
io Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades4
Vexed 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,
15 Myself not least, but honored 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
20 Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!5
5. A yellow lilylike flower supposed to grow in Ely-involved in governing his kingdom. sium?in classical mythology a paradise for heroes Tennyson stated that this poem expressed his favored by the gods. own 'need of going forward and braving the strug- I. According to Dante, after the fall of Troy, Ulys-gle of life' after the death of Arthur Haliam. ses never returned to his island home of Ithaca. 2. Measure out rewards and punishments. Instead he persuaded some of his followers to seek 3. Cf. Shakespeare's Hamlet 4.4.9.23-25: 'What new experiences by a voyage of exploration west-is a man / If his chief good .. . Be but to sleep and ward out beyond the Strait of Gibraltar. In his feed??a beast, no more.' inspiring speech to his aging crew he said: 'Con-4. A group of stars (literally, 'rainy ones') in the sider your origin: you were not made to live as constellation Taurus; their heliacal rising and set- brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge' ting generally coincided with the season of heavy (Inferno 26). Tennyson modified Dante's 14th-rains. 'Scudding drifts': driving showers of spray century version by combining it with Homer's and rain. account (Odyssey 19?24). Thus Tennyson has 5. Cf. Ulysses' speech in Shakespeare's Troilus Ulysses make his speech in Ithaca some time after and Cressida 3.3.144-^47: 'Perseverance, dear my he has returned home; reunited with his wife, lord, / Keeps honour bright. To have done is to Penelope, and his son, Telemachus; and, presum-hang / Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail / In ably, resumed his administrative responsibilities monumental mock'ry.'
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