Ulysses (poem): Themes

Meaning Lies in the Pursuit of Achievement

Perhaps the most central theme in Tennyson’s poem relates to the value of pursuit. Indeed, “Ulysses” as a whole may be read as espousing a philosophy of life where the most important meaning lies in the pursuit of achievement. The speaker first introduces this philosophy in the opening stanza. There, he frames all forms of idleness in negative terms (lines 22–24):

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life!

These lines reflect Ulysses’ frustration with his life as king of Ithaca, where he does little more than preside over a community he derides for their idle complacency. It’s in implicit judgment of his own people that the speaker declares, with exasperation, “As tho’ to breathe were life!” Against this negative image of idleness, Ulysses offers his own “hungry heart” (line 12) as an example of what life should really be about. Rather than rest on his laurels, Ulysses longs for new adventures. Such adventures will push him “to follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought” (lines 31–32). Crucially, the pursuit of achievement is more important than the achievement itself. It may be impossible to reach that “beyond,” but the striving is itself noble, meaningful, and hence life-giving.

The Primacy of the Individual over the Collective

For Ulysses, the will of the individual takes precedence over the needs of the collective. This theme can be seen in the way the speaker dismisses other people while presenting his own personal desires as noble and all-important. Consider how Ulysses talks about his family. He offers eleven lines of lukewarm praise for his son, and he devotes just two words to Penelope, his “aged wife” (line 3). He’s similarly dismissive of his community, which he deems “a savage race” (line 4). Meanwhile, he spends twenty-seven lines celebrating the adventurous life, and another twenty-six lines exhorting his mariners to ready the sails for his next voyage. This imbalance clearly shows some egotism on the speaker’s part. More importantly, though, it demonstrates the extent to which he conceives of achievement as an individual pursuit. Ulysses doesn’t consider his public service a real achievement, since all he does is “mete and dole / Unequal laws” that he had no hand in establishing (lines 3–4). Furthermore, public service has an alienating effect, since he remains distanced from his subjects. To resist the alienation and lack of agency he feels as king, Ulysses must abandon his responsibility to the collective and reassert his individual will.

Experience Shapes the Person

Ulysses has seen a lot in his life. Not only did he spend ten years of his life fighting in the Trojan War, but then he went on to spend another ten years struggling to make his way home. Ulysses recalls some of these experiences in the poem’s first stanza, where he recalls “the rainy Hyades” (line 10) and the “ringing plains of windy Troy” (line 17). His reason for making these references isn’t simply to indulge in nostalgia for a time when he was young and active. Instead, he wants to emphasize the degree to which his experience has shaped him. As he puts the matter in lines 18–21:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.

This passage begins with a simple statement about how his experiences have made him the man he is. But Ulysses complicates this idea in the lines that follow, where he develops an intriguing metaphor for experience. The speaker links experience to an “arch” through which the viewer can see the glittering ocean and imagine what it’s like to sail it. This metaphor implies that experience isn’t just something that happened in someone’s past. Instead, it’s a lens that frames how a person sees the world in the present.

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