Thompson Harrison
From Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of 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,
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 days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
The above is an extract – the end, in fact – of the poem Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892). Tennyson is one of the most renowned English poets, serving as Laureate during a large part of Queen Victoria’s reign, and many of his poems are frequently cited, taught, and quoted to this day, including his elegy In Memoriam and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, which documents some events of the Crimean War.
Ulysses is a different kind of poem: a dramatic monologue. This means that Tennyson has chosen to adopt a persona – an assumed voice through which the poet speaks – to get his point across. He has chosen Ulysses (which is the Latin variant of the name Odysseus) to unfold a complex and moving meditation on the purpose of mankind and the individuals of which it is comprised. In Greek myth, Ulysses was the king of Ithaca and a seafaring soldier, revered for his cunning, wit, and intelligence. We can see how Tennyson how displays such a mind through his sturdy, decisive iambic pentameter (each line has five ‘beats’):
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Notice, too, how the poem ‘holds’ at its line-endings, as though carefully considering its next move. Tennyson is using an expert combination of metre, caesura (that’s a pause in the middle of a line, as in ‘The sounding furrows; for’) and enjambment (that’s when a line runs over into the one below, as in ‘for my purpose | To sail beyond the sunset’) to show that true purpose does not blindly blunder forwards, but takes its time, considers, then makes a carefully thought-out movement.
What’s more, Tennyson’s Ulysses does not simply find strength in purpose in the body’s physicality; in fact, he acknowledges that he’s not as young as he once was: ‘Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' | We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven’. Purpose never leaves us, it simply changes; and though the vaults of heaven may one day, to us, be unmovable, we always retain that human capacity to move each other.
