(2) ALFRED LORD TENNYSON –

ULYSSES (1842)

 

“I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me”.

 

Well, there’s a job description for you, surprisingly close to my actual job description.

Okay, technically it doesn’t adapt the original but is a sequel, invoking the same heroic spirit for one last sail into the sunset – which I can’t help but feel was an influence on my next entry.

However, after Evslin, it was my next invocation of the Odyssey as a child before reading the Odyssey itself.

Alfred Lord Tennyson – archetypal poet of Victorian literature and poet laureate – and his Ulysses – poem in blank verse and dramatic monologue. Dramatic monologue to whom is not clear, but by whom is of course the classical hero of Iliad and Odyssey, Odysseus, or as the Romans called him, Ulysses.

Companion poem to his earlier “The Lotus Eaters” also inspired by the Odyssey but complete opposite to the former poem’s anti-heroism – where “The Lotus Eaters” resists the heroic call to action for slacking off and, well, eating lotus (because we’re just so wasted, man), “Ulysses” accepts it and indeed issues it.

 

“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 deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world”

 

Ulysses is particularly effective – and emotive – as that last call to heroic action, literally riding (or sailing) off into the sunset in one’s own twilight.

 

“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”.