ULYSSES - TENNYSON

The poet's method

The form of the poem
 The poem is written in the iambic
pentameter line familiar from the
plays of Shakespeare.
 The lines are not rhymed at the
end, and we call this blank verse.
 Tennyson is the most fluent of
writers and he is comfortable with
end-stopped and run-on lines.
Rhetoric
 The poem uses several tricks of
rhetoric - to make speaking
memorable and persuasive. We
find antithesis (contrasting
phrases) in:
 "I cannot rest from travel: I will
drink/Life to the lees" or in
 "to rust unburnished, not to shine
in use".
Rhetoric
 "...that which we are, we are."
 Ulysses' manner of speaking here
often recalls the rhetoric of Satan
in Milton's Paradise Lost.
Imagery
 Metaphor and simile abound in the
poem:
 experience is an arch, inactivity is
like rusting
 action is like burnishing (polishing;
a very apt image as it suggests the
warriors' armour that is burnished
for use, or left to rust)
Imagery
 The poem is also decorated with lines
one can take out of their context, and
use almost as proverbs:
 "I am a part of all that I have met..."
 "...all experience is an arch..."
 "How dull it is to pause, to make an
end..."
 Death closes all..."
 "'Tis not too late to seek a newer
world..."
Imagery
 Ulysses' spirit is "gray" and yearns with
desire to "follow knowledge like a
sinking star/Beyond the utmost bound
of human thought"
 a very complex series of images - try to
visualise them, and you will realise this.
 How many more images can you find,
what do they mean, and how do they
work?
Ambiguity and double
meanings
 Ulysses would not know of the open
ocean beyond the great sea (which we
call the Mediterranean) - nor that there
is land to the west.
 And no Greek ship, had it passed into
the Atlantic, could safely have reached
America.
 But Tennyson (like his readers), of
course, does know there is land here,
and that the voyage is possible, if
Ambiguity and double
meanings
 Ulysses wonders if he may find
again the great hero, Achilles,
whom he has not seen, since his
death when Troy fell.
 Many readers think that Tennyson
identifies "the great Achilles" with
his own lost friend, Arthur Hallam
Ulysses - Method
 Taken from
http://www.shunsley.eril.net/armoore