Old Age, Loss, and Longing in Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’

“Odysseus [Ulysses] and Polyphemus,” 1896, by Arnold Böcklin. As an old man, Ulysses misses great deeds and adventures, in Tennyson's poem. (Public Domain)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote a deep reflection on loss, aging, and longing when he was just 24. This poem—one of his best known—is “Ulysses”; it recasts the hero of Homer’s “Odyssey” as an old man, long after the adventures of his 10-year journey home from the Trojan War. Now, he contemplates a final voyage.

This dramatic monologue gives us a glimpse of the old hero’s restless mind and yearning heart that seeks for something elusive: partly knowledge, adventure, the lost days of youth, the lost companions of the past, and the transcendent.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson as painted in 1840 by Edward Burne-Jones. (Public Domain)

Great Art Came Tragedy

How did such a young poet so convincingly inhabit the mind of an old man? The answer is, in part, poetic intuition. A poet is one who can absorb experiences, take on other perspectives, one who has the gift for understanding many different states of being and can express those in words. The poet lives many lifetimes in his or her single life.

Tennyson had been sobered already by serious loss. When he wrote the poem in 1833, his best friend and close companion Arthur Hallam had recently died. This tragic experience greatly informed the poem—and much of Tennyson’s life and work thereafter.

In a note on “Ulysses,” Tennyson wrote that the poem “was more written with the feeling of [Hallam’s] loss upon [him] than many poems in ‘In Memoriam’” and that it gave him a “feeling about the need of going forward, and braving the struggle of life.”

The poem certainly begins with a sense of loss and disillusionment. Ulysses says,

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.

Ulysses’s familiar, mundane life as king of Ithaca has lost all meaning for him. He struggles to see its purpose, as Tennyson might have struggled to find the purpose of his own life in the wake of Hallam’s death. In Tennyson’s imagination, Ulysses—a man who has seen wars, monsters, marvels and great high palaces of kings, and even defied the god of the sea—cannot reconcile himself to the quiet life on Ithaca. He speaks of his people with disgust and of his wife with boredom.

Here, Tennyson has upended, or at least added to, Homer’s version of events, in which Ulysses longs for home, longs to hold his wife in his arms again, and undergoes great sufferings to get there, albeit with unnecessary delays. By this time, his longing for peace and home—the driving force behind “The Odyssey”—has faded away and failed to satisfy the hero’s heart.

As critic Robert Pattison writes in “Tennyson and Tradition,” “Penelope, who in Homer had been the goal of his odyssey, is now reduced to ‘an aged wife.’ So much for romance. Family and social bonds are as easily dismissed.” Tennyson’s Ulysses is content to leave his son behind to rule on his own while he seeks more adventures.

"The meeting of Ulysses and Penelope," 1788, by Francesco Bartolozzi, after John Francis Rigaud. Etching and dotted engraving on paper. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Public Domain)

It’s not entirely clear whether we are to admire Ulysses’s dispositions here or not. His praiseworthy energy and resolve must be weighed against their selfish bent. Surely, he expresses some admirable sentiments, but, as William Harmon reminds us in “The Classic Hundred Poems,” Ulysses hasn’t always been portrayed favorably in world literature. Dante, probably following Virgil, placed Ulysses deep in his inferno because he considered him a false counselor, unfaithful husband, negligent parent, and cunning deceiver (legend says the Trojan Horse was his idea). Dante holds that Ulysses and his crew perished in a final voyage, probably the one Tennyson’s Ulysses envisions in this dramatic speech.

In comparison, Homer favored the mythic character. Homeric scholar Eva Brann contends in “Homeric Moments” that the Ulysses whom Tennyson depicts is not the true Ulysses of Homer. Homer’s Ulysses “is no perpetual wanderer,” but “comes home for good to rule his island, guide its promising crown prince, and live to a ripe old age with his peerless wife.”

Objects of Longing

Tennyson presents a complex portrait that combines elements of both schools—those that consider Ulysses heroic and those that do not. The Ulysses of this poem, dissatisfied with home and hearth, longs for something more. “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink / Life to the lees ... always roaming with a hungry heart.”

What, precisely, does he long for? Tennyson presents several possibilities.

The first is knowledge and experience, which are exhibited in the line “To follow knowledge like a sinking star / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” Ulysses loves to see new sights and hear new tales. He seems to possess a breathless thirst for new experiences and facts. He wants experience for experience’s sake.

Ulysses's ship passing between the six-headed monster Scylia and the whirlpool Charybdis, by Allessandro Allori, circa 1575, from a fresco. (Public Domain)

In that same section of the poem, Ulysses expresses gluttony for life, jam-packing his final years, days, and hours with excitement. “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.” An undercurrent of the fear of death run through these lines. The old man knows his time is running out, and, rather than looking to the afterlife, the existence of which he seems to doubt, he opts to “seize the day” instead.

Ulysses recalls with relish his past deeds, reliving “the glory days.” He lives partly in the past. Perhaps he speaks for older men who long for exploits of youth.

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.”

Stirring as they are, these lines are almost pitiful. Ulysses doesn’t know what hour it is—or else he knows too well. The time for such deeds is past. He must let his youth go. And he has, perhaps, misjudged in what the “honour and toil” of old age actually consists.

A Time to Sow, A Time to Reap

Tennyson here speaks of the universal reality of our human estate: We’re made weak over time by our bodies and their limitations. A paradox can exist in the old man or woman. A mind may gleam with potent strength, a will hard-armored and piercing, but the limbs are withered and feeble, unable to serve that mind anymore. “Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Such is the challenge of aging, which Tennyson expresses here with deep insight for such a young poet.

After Odysseus’s life lessons conclude, he is finally able to reunite with his beloved Penelope, his wife. “Odysseus [Ulysses] and Penelope” by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. (Public Domain)

Experience, new sights, and the lost days of youth—these occupy Ulysses’s mind. But there’s something beyond these that the old king yearns for. As Ulysses himself says, “Yet all experience is an arch wherethro‘/ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades/ For ever and forever when I move.” The full expression of Ulysses’s desires defy expression. Another world calls, but remains ever out of reach. Literary critic Nasrullah Mambrol suggests, “what he wants is life, but he wants it not for its own sake but for something hauntingly elusive.” It’s the tantalizing desire for the transcendent.

This unnamable longing finds expression in concrete imagery only toward the end of the poem. “The vessel puffs her sail / There gloom the dark, broad seas.” The ocean and the ship call to Ulysses. “The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep/ Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.” The many hard accents in these lines gives them a sense of urgency; they’re like repeated blows to the heart. We can hear the seething and crashing of the beckoning sea in the sounds of these lines: “The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds/ To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths/ Of all the western stars, until I die.”

Like all the greatest poetry, “Ulysses,” especially in its closing, draws readers’ minds to the highest things and to a sense of wonder.

All great art should produce longing. Here, we catch something of Ulysses’s contagious yearning. “It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.”

Tennyson’s depiction of Ulysses is complex, which isn’t surprising for a character portrayed in such contradictory ways over the ages—a hero to Homer, a rogue to Virgil and Dante. In this poem, Ulysses possesses a thrilling zest for life, an inspiring desire to grip each moment in his fist and squeeze out every drop of life that he can. We can all relate to the desire to live life to its fullest. The speaker of this poem possesses a greatness of soul.

The return of Ulysses, illustration by E. M. Synge from the 1909 "Story of the World" children's book series. Ulysses's dreams of returning home didn't live up to the reality, as expressed in Tennyson's dramatic monologue. (Public Domain)

Yet there is simultaneously something pitiable about him. We have the impression that Ulysses refuses to acknowledge that he is old and youth is past, that the time for physical exploits is over, and perhaps, he should look to his soul instead. At the poem’s core, there is a tragic inability to see that the path to deeper meaning for Ulysses lies through embracing his familial and political obligations. What he’s looking for “out there” might actually be right in front of him.

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