Ulysses (poem)

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Literary Devices

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Literary Devices Tone

The tone of “Ulysses” is at once restless and rousing, which reflects the speaker’s competing moods. Tennyson reflects Ulysses’ sense of restlessness formally, through his careful management of line endings and midline pauses. Many lines in “Ulysses” are enjambed (en-JAMMED) and hence run into the next line without stopping. Yet the frequency of enjambment doesn’t mean that the poem’s language flows freely throughout. Indeed, Tennyson frequently regulates the flow and pace of the language with midline punctuation, which creates strong pauses and, occasionally, full stops. This type of strong pause within an individual line is known as caesura (say-ZHOO-rah). Taken together, Tennyson’s combined use of enjambment and caesura generates dynamically shifting verse that mirrors the speaker’s sense of restlessness. The poem’s language also has a rousing force. This force stems from Tennyson’s careful attention to sound, cadence, and diction. But more than anything, the power of language in “Ulysses” stems from Tennyson’s strategy of arranging lists in order of increasing importance. This rhetorical technique, known as climax, is nowhere better deployed than in the poem’s rousing final line: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” (line 70).