Ulysses (poem): Motifs

The Body versus the Will

A key tension in Tennyson’s poem pits the body against the will. At the time of his speech, Ulysses is in middle age. He was already a mature man when he left for the Trojan War, and he didn’t return home to Ithaca for another twenty years. Now, “some three suns” (line 29) since his return, Ulysses is feeling his age and longs for one last outing. Ulysses first references his age obliquely, when he briefly mentions Penelope, his “aged wife” (line 3). Ulysses sees in his wife a reflection of his own age, and he doesn’t like it. However, he doesn’t directly acknowledge his disappointment, and instead he adopts a tone that implicitly dismisses his wife. More explicit acknowledgement of his age doesn’t come until the third stanza, where the depletion of the body gives Ulysses and his mariners a reason to strive with their wills (lines 49–53):

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The speaker reiterates this contrast between age and will in the poem’s final lines (68–70):

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.

These men may all possess aging bodies that have been “made weak by time and fate.” Even so, Ulysses celebrates their power to remain “free” in their hearts and minds, forever “strong in will.”

Dynamic Language

Throughout “Ulysses,” the speaker frequently uses dynamic language to emphasize movement. Of course, the importance of this language must be understood in relation to the speaker’s rejection of stillness. The poem begins with Ulysses describing himself as “an idle king, / By this still hearth, among these barren crags” (lines 1–2). The speaker echoes the reference to his own idleness with a description of his home as a place of stillness and, hence, of barrenness. Clearly, stillness is a bleak state of being, tantamount to death. Like a shark that can only survive by swimming constantly, the speaker must keep moving. Hence his declaration in line 6: “I cannot rest from travel.” To support this claim, the speaker recalls past adventures, the life-giving powers of which he emphasizes with dynamic language. For example, he describes how, once, “thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades / Vext the dim sea” (lines 10–11). He makes similar use of dynamic adjectives in his recollection of “the ringing plains of windy Troy” (line 18). The speaker makes many additional references to movement throughout the poem, culminating in his climactic list, where he announces his desire “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” (line 70).