You don’t need to spend long around here to realise Tennyson’s Ulysses is my favourite poem.
He’s also my favourite poet. That said, I’ll wait until his birthday to expand on the other works which have made me laugh, cry (even in class), feel, or simply think, over the years. Today, on the anniversary of his death, we’ll stick with the 550-ish words I’m currently trying to learn by heart.
The poem is such an epic, as quotable as a Tarantino film, that it feels almost flippant to reduce it to a single line or two. That said, there is an obvious choice; obvious to me, at least, because it speaks to my philosophy as I get older.
This is a great poem to teach, by the way, because the vast majority of students are just setting out to find glory in Troy whereas I (figuratively) have returned after many years’ wandering. Of course our attitudes and interpretations will differ, as I’ve said elsewhere. I think it would be worrying if they didn’t.
For a long time, I thought that my next tattoo would be Richard II’s ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me’.1 Nowadays I see that less as a warning or carpe diem, and more of the lament of someone realising it is far, far too late.
(This is a lesson for youngsters to wait – a good while – before committing to a tattoo.)
Ulysses is almost the antithesis of Richard II.
Shakespeare’s monarch gives up surprisingly early in the play (in fact, there’s an argument to be had, another time, that he has given up before the play even begins).
But the monarch of Ithaca?
Tennyson’s awe-inspiring figure reflects with pride on a life fully experienced. Then he looks forward, unflinchingly, to what is left.
Time is a foe Ulysses cannot conquer. As he tells his men towards the end:
“Death closes all”2
But Ulysses can choose how to play a losing hand.
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Often, I’ll pair this with Dylan Thomas’s urge to ‘rage against the dying of the light’.3 Today – and this is the beauty of the written word, and perhaps poetry in particular – I see daylight between them.
Where Dylan Thomas wants to rage against death itself, Tennyson seems almost more pragmatic: let death come when it will. In the meantime, wring every available drop of juice (I’m paraphrasing the late, great James Clavell4) out of every moment we have left.
The one thing Death won’t find Ulysses doing?
Doomscrolling. Killing time.
Look at those four incredible infinitives. Strive. Seek. Find. Yield. The first three propel Ulysses forwards (please tell me you knew they inspired ; the fourth is the one he refuses to do.
Life is too precious to be surrendered, so it will have to be taken from him.
I think that’s why this is the next tattoo.
‘But what about the graphic?’ I hear you say …
Ulysses is absolutely the poem for the Star Trek fans amongst you.
The beloved TV show is surely a 20th-century SF-flavoured descendant of the great epic journey that is The Odyssey (complete with Kirk seducing all manner of female aliens along the way). And Kirk’s opening monologue has an intriguing resemblance to Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’.
‘Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.’5
My emphasis.
References and further reading
- William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2002) ↩︎
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses (1842) – read the poem at the Poetry Foundation ↩︎
- Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (1951) – watch Michael Sheen perform this work for the National Theatre ↩︎
- James Clavell, Shōgun: A Novel of Japan (Hodder and Stoughton, 1975). ↩︎
- National Air and Space Museum – here ↩︎
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