Opinions of 'Ulysses': A Perfect Man

Mazzeno’s review of ‘Ulysses’ begins with an outlook on different perspectives of critics. While Tennyson's contemporaries seem to view it as the heroic spirit who is determined ‘to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’, some later critics see it as the most unconscious confessions of a king who has failed. He, after all, proposes to abandon his family and his kingdom, run away from his duties and risk the lives of his companions with a desire to explore more in life. It is true that Tennyson's Ulysses is not a perfect man.

However, as Mazzeno suggests Ulysses search is his reason for living, and that there is a search for adventure, experience, and meaning which make life worth living. Mazzeno seems to be supporting the view that Ulysses is not ready to accept a more passive lifestyle as a king but instead feels the urge to go on the search for adventure, experience, and meaning to make his life worth living. Once he decides to leave the monarchy to his son, Telemachus, he gathers up a crew of men to sail with him across the oceans of the world.

Mazzeno points out that Ulysses speech is elevated in tone as well as filled with images and sounds that suggest the emotional state of the speaker. He backs up this point by referencing the lines in the poem, ‘the long day wanes, the slow moon climbs, the deep/ Moans round with many voices,’. Further, his use of ‘repetition of vowel sounds in ‘day’ and ‘wane’, the alliteration of ‘moon’ and ‘Moans’, and the slow, humming murmur of all those m’s and n’s’ create a musical effect that suggest a melancholy mood ‘but not, in the end, the voice of a man trying to simple escape’. Moreover, Ulysses seems to be hinting to the idea that he feels ready to die, only if he is living an adventure that he was supposed to be on.

Perhaps this is illustrated within the lines in the poem in which Ulysses is persuading the crew to sail with him. 'There is a recognised risk in action: ‘It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,' he tells them, but if they are fortunate enough, they may ‘touch the Happy Isles, / And see the great Achilles that we knew'. This perhaps suggests that this is a journey to death and that Ulysses is searching for adventure and ultimate death. So, he may have left his kingdom and family because he really believed that he belonged on adventures until the day that he died, or it may just have been a way to escape his responsibilities as king. It could be claimed that Ulysses needed the sea and leaving the kingship to Telemachus was a much too easy way to escape from the boredom of being King of Ithaca.

Either of the two opinions of ‘Ulysses’ in Mazzeno’s article could be true. It is true that Ulysses really believed he didn't belong in Ithaca he desired to move on and face new challenges. In the first stanza, Ulysses mentions his comfortable life as a king who has a family, a kingdom, food, a place to sleep, etc. however before then he uses the phrase ‘It little profits that an idle king', which is another way of saying he is sitting around and he is bored because Ithaca is boring. He is aware if he stays and continues his life as a king and not as an explorer that he will die bored and miserable. When he was a man of action he always enjoyed life despite the fact that he suffered greatly.

The idea that Ulysses is a failed king could be easily picked up on because of how he chooses to deal with his notion of problems. He lived his life to the fullest for twenty years and returned home to live in comfort as a king. This perhaps implies he believes himself to be above his entire kingdom. He is reluctant to fulfill his duties as king as he must ‘mete and dole/ Unequal laws unto a savage race, / That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. 'Describing his people as savage probably suggests that he considers them to be primitive and uncivilised, and since he experienced the world, he sees himself much smarter and higher ranking than them.

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Even as they obey their king in line five, they don't seem to know the legend they are obeying. Ulysses knows that he is popular. For example, in line eleven, he says ‘I am become a name'. He is aware that the world has heard of his achievements and his exemplary heroism. He has lost many battles, so he is humble, but also has won just as many, so he is a warrior. Indeed, he could very easily be a man who just wants to be able to do the things he desires, but he could also just easily be an old king who cannot get out of not letting go that he is no longer the young adventurer he used to be.

As Mazzeno states, Tennyson utilised the poetic form of a dramatic monologue in Ulysses. According to Robert Fraser, this form ‘accentuates the feeling and the message of the poem' where Ulysses is addressing a crowd of his followers. Both Mazzeno and Fraser seem to suggest that Ulysses drives from Homeric myth. Although this time Tennyson's, the main source was not Homer but the medieval Florentine poet Dante.

The Inferno, the first part of Dante's poem, the Divine Comedy, in which a vision is evoked where Dante passes through nine circles of Hell. He encounters Ulysses shade in the eight circles who told him that after returning to Ithaca he had persuaded his crewmen to go on one final voyage to past the Pillar of Hercules near the western straits of the Mediterranean. This would prove fatal, and result in Ulysses' detention in Hell for the sin of abusing of the intellect. In spite of this, Dante's words to Ulysses as he exhorts his men to this final, ill-fated expedition are heroic: ‘Call to mind from whence ye sprang: / Ye were not formed to live the life of brutes, / But virtue to pursue and knowledge high. It draws on ancient Greek myth. So, ‘Ulysses' is a poem to which xx refers to as ‘a later source on which Tennyson drew had significantly revised and extended the perspectives of an earlier one'.

As reported by Homer, after his prolonged absence The Odyssey, Ulysses returned home and killed all the suitors of his long-suffering wife Penelope and was reunited with his long-suffering wife and his capable son Telemachus. In book 11, the blind prophet Tiresias appears and foretells that Ulysses will once more set sail on the high seas that is doomed to be deadly. This is what Dante had seized and expanded on from Homer's work for his own objectives thus hinting at the theme of Tennyson's poem. Tennyson wrote a fairly long elegy to Dante whom with he was very familiar. Tennyson's close friend Hallam was also a Dante enthusiast.

Hallam's influence on Tennyson's work, especially in the form of long elegiac sequence ‘In Memoriam'. According to Tennyson's own account, he wrote ‘Ulysses' shortly after Hallam's sudden and unexpected death on a trip to Vienna, and Tennyson was devastated. Therefore, it could be questioned how far should we allow our interpretation of the poem as reflections of the author's life. It is difficult or impossible to know whether a particular life event may be relevant to Tennyson's poem until we read more about both the poem and his life. Or due to the fact that, although important for Dante's narrative, but not actually mentioned by Tennyson that Ulysses and his crew perished on the voyage towards which the poem beckons?

The image of ‘Ulysses' seemingly provides idealised representations of the perpetual movement, perpetual development, perpetual adventure characteristic of the Victorian age in which imperial expansion, geographical and scientific discoveries were much desired. The Catholic readers of Dante's poem, by contrast, were more attuned to the medieval philosophy that human knowledge has limits which no one can surpass. Dante seemed to have held that mankind should not proceed beyond the limits set for man by God, otherwise they will clash with God's requirements.

Therefore, Tennyson's poem, indirectly, deals with and even questions the realities of human need or desire to empower in the nineteenth century. Dante's ‘Ulysses' leads us into the culture of the nineteenth century revealing its faults enthralled as it was by scientific progress, while clearly embracing a Christian belief that in its traditional forms had urged submissiveness and intellectual self-control. It could be argued then that we are dealing with a poem that is seemingly floored optimistic, while at its core is extremely pessimistic which at times breaks into the energetic surface of the poem, like at line 31 where knowledge is compared with ‘a sinking star’. These contradictions are intensified by the dramatic dialogue form, which allows Ulysses to reveal his possibly deluded thoughts in his own words. If Tennyson is making use of both Homer and Dante, his approach to his subject matter can only be greatly divided.