It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honour’d of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. 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 For ever and forever when I move. 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! Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains: but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. This is my son, mine own Telemachus, To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,— Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil This labour, by slow prudence to make mild A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees Subdue them to the useful and the good. Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to my household gods, When I am gone. He works his work, I mine. There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me— That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed 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 lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, ’T is not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; 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.
On This Page: Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Glossary · Related Poems
Summary
An old Ulysses, home in Ithaca years after the Trojan War and his long voyage back, is bored and restless. Ruling a dull kingdom of people he holds in contempt, married to an aging wife, he finds settled life unbearable. He looks back on a life of travel, battle, and fame, and decides he cannot end his days idle by the hearth. He hands the throne to his son Telemachus, who is suited to the patient work of governing, and turns to the old sailors who served with him. In a closing speech he calls them to launch the ship one more time and sail west past the horizon in search of something new, even if the voyage kills them. The poem ends on his refusal to give in: to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Background
Tennyson wrote “Ulysses” in 1833, within weeks of the death of Arthur Hallam, his closest friend and his sister’s fiancé, who died suddenly at twenty-two. It was published in the 1842 Poems. Tennyson said the poem “gave my feeling about the need of going forward, and braving the struggle of life, perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam.” That is the key biographical fact: this is not a poem about adventure so much as a poem about how to keep living after a loss that makes living seem pointless. The defiance in it is grief turned outward.
The other key fact is the source. Most readers assume Tennyson is drawing on Homer, but his Ulysses comes mainly from Dante. In Canto XXVI of the Inferno, Ulysses is in Hell, punished for the restless curiosity that drove him and his crew on a final voyage past the limits of the known world to their deaths. Dante condemns the very hunger that Tennyson’s poem celebrates. Once you know the poem is built on a damned soul, the gorgeous rhetoric of pushing off into the sunset starts to look less like simple heroism and more like something Tennyson wanted us to admire and distrust at the same time.
Analysis and Themes
“Ulysses” is the most quoted and most misquoted poem in Victorian English. Its last line has been carved on monuments, printed on posters, and used to sell perseverance to schoolchildren and athletes. But the inspirational reading survives only by amputating the line from the poem around it, which is far stranger: a portrait of a man who may be a hero refusing to fade, or an aging egotist abandoning everyone who depends on him, dressed in some of the most beautiful blank verse in the language. The greatness of the poem is that it will not tell you which.
Hero or Deserter
Listen to how Ulysses describes his own kingdom. His people are “a savage race, / That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.” His wife — Penelope, the faithful center of the entire Odyssey, the reason he spent twenty years fighting to get home — is dismissed in three cold words: “an aged wife.” The throne he won is now an “idle” burden. This is the speech of a man for whom ordinary obligation has become contemptible. The voyage he proposes is magnificent, but notice what it actually is: a king walking away from his subjects, his marriage, and his duties because they bore him, and recasting that abandonment as the noble refusal to “rust unburnish’d.” The poem lets him sound heroic. It also lets you notice that heroism and selfishness are using the exact same words.
The Faint Praise of Telemachus
The most quietly damning passage in the poem is the handoff to his son. Read what Ulysses actually says about Telemachus: he is “blameless,” “decent,” “centred in the sphere / Of common duties.” Every one of those words is praise with the air let out of it. Blameless and decent are what you call someone you find dull; “common duties” is precisely the life Ulysses has just declared beneath him. He is praising his son for being good at exactly the small, patient, unglamorous work that he himself refuses to do. The passage ends on five flat, separating words: “He works his work, I mine.” The line divides the dutiful son from the glory-seeking father and makes clear which one Ulysses thinks he is. It is the kindest possible way of saying his child is not interesting enough to come along.
The Voyage That Never Begins
Here is the strangest thing about this poem of restless motion: nothing in it moves. Ulysses talks for seventy lines and never takes a step. “There lies the port,” he says; “Push off,” he urges. But the ship is still at the dock when the poem ends. The whole monologue is a man standing on the shore declaiming about leaving, and that gap between the rhetoric of departure and the fact of stasis is the deepest thing in it. It is why the cheerful inspirational reading rings slightly hollow. What Ulysses is really after is not a destination — “that untravell’d world whose margin fades / For ever and for ever when I move” can never be reached by definition — but motion away from an unbearable stillness, a way to outrun the “eternal silence” that is plainly death. The voyage he half-admits may “wash us down” is as much a death-wish as a quest. Read alongside the grief that produced it, the poem is less a call to adventure than a man talking himself into surviving one more day, and not entirely succeeding.
Form and Technique
“Ulysses” is a dramatic monologue in blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter — and it is one of the form’s founding examples in English, alongside Browning’s. The dramatic monologue is the perfect vehicle for this poem precisely because it works by self-betrayal: a single speaker addresses an implied listener and, in the act of justifying himself, reveals more than he means to. Everything troubling about Ulysses comes to us in his own admiring words. Tennyson never steps in to judge him. The form makes the reader do the judging, which is why the poem can be read two opposite ways without either being wrong.
The poem falls into three movements marked by its verse paragraphs: Ulysses alone with his discontent, the handoff to Telemachus, and the address to his mariners on the shore. The syntax runs on restlessly across line endings, enjambment piling clause on clause to mimic the forward push the speaker craves, then pulling up against hard mid-line stops: “Death closes all: but something ere the end.” Listen to the famous final line, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” — almost entirely monosyllables, four hammer-blow verbs, the meter beating like a pulse or a war drum. Tennyson loads the close with that pounding deliberately, so the line feels unanswerable. It is the sound of conviction, which is not the same as the sound of truth, and the poem knows the difference.
Notable Lines
Three passages carry the poem from its restless engine, through its coldest moment, to its famous close.
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Lines 19–21
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
The most beautiful image in the poem and the key to its psychology. The horizon recedes exactly as fast as you approach it; the “untravell’d world” can never be reached. Ulysses is in love with a goal that is structurally impossible to arrive at, which tells you the point was never arrival.
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
Line 43
Five words to dispose of his son and the whole life of duty he represents. The flat symmetry of the line draws a clean border between Telemachus and his father, and leaves no doubt which side Ulysses values. The entire ambivalence of the poem is compressed here.
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Lines 68–70
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
The most famous lines Tennyson ever wrote, almost always quoted alone as pure uplift. In context they are spoken by an old man rallying other old men toward a voyage that may drown them all. The defiance is real and stirring; it is also the sound of someone refusing to accept a limit that is, in fact, coming for him. That doubleness is what keeps the ending from being a slogan.
Glossary
A handful of older usages and classical references worth knowing:
- mete and dole (line 3) — to measure out and hand round; here, to administer laws.
- lees (line 7) — the dregs at the bottom of a wine cask; to drink “to the lees” is to drain it to the last drop.
- Hyades (line 10) — a cluster of stars that, rising with the sun, were associated with the rainy season.
- meet (line 42) — fitting, proper; here, “meet adoration” means due reverence.
- sounding furrows (line 59) — the resounding troughs the oars cut in the sea.
- the Happy Isles (line 63) — in Greek myth, the islands of the blessed in the far west, where favoured heroes dwell after death.
Related Poems
If this poem holds you, these three sit closest to it in form, source, or feeling.
- Tithonus by Alfred, Lord Tennyson — the dark twin of “Ulysses,” written around the same time: another aged classical figure in dramatic monologue, but one granted endless life without youth, who longs to die where Ulysses longs to live. Read together they are two halves of one argument about mortality.
- My Last Duchess by Robert Browning — the other great Victorian dramatic monologue, and the clearest demonstration of how the form lets a speaker condemn himself out of his own mouth while believing he is doing the opposite.
- In Memoriam A.H.H. by Alfred, Lord Tennyson — the long elegy for Arthur Hallam that the same grief produced over seventeen years. “Ulysses” is the compressed, defiant version of the loss that In Memoriam works through slowly.