Page 365 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes death—”Life piled on life / were all too little, and of one to me / little remains” (24–26)—and longs
for further experience and knowledge. His son Telemachus will inherit the throne that Ulysses
finds burdensome. While Ulysses thinks Telemachus will be an adequate king, he seems to have
little empathy for his son—”He works his work, I mine” (43)—and the necessary methods of
governing—”by slow prudence” (36) and “through soft degrees” (37). In the final section, Ulysses
turns his attention to his mariners and calls on them to join him on another quest, making no
guarantees as to their fate but attempting to conjure their heroic past:

… Come, my friends,
Tis 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. (56–64)
Prosody
The speaker’s language is unadorned and forceful, and it expresses Ulysses’ conflicting moods as he
searches for continuity between his past and future. There is often a marked contrast between the
sentiment of Ulysses’ words and the sounds that express them. For example, the poem’s insistent
iambic pentameter is often interrupted by spondees (metrical feet consisting of two long syllables),
which slow down the movement of the poem; the labouring language casts into doubt the reliability
of Ulysses’ sentiments. Noteworthy are lines 19–21:
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move. (19–21)
Observing their burdensome prosodic effect, the poet Matthew Arnold remarked, “these three lines
by themselves take up nearly as much time as a whole book of the Iliad.” Many of the poem’s
clauses carry over into the following line; this enjambment emphasizes Ulysses’ restlessness and
dissatisfaction.

Form
The poem’s seventy lines of blank verse are presented as a dramatic monologue. Scholars disagree on
how Ulysses’ speech functions in this format; it is not necessarily clear to whom Ulysses is speaking,
if anyone, and from what location. Some see the verse turning from a soliloquy to a public address, as
Ulysses seems to speak to himself in the first movement, then to turn to an audience as he introduces
his son, and then to relocate to the seashore where he addresses his mariners. In this interpretation,
the comparatively direct and honest language of the first movement is set against the more politically
minded tone of the last two movements. For example, the second paragraph (33–43) about Telemachus,
in which Ulysses muses again about domestic life, is a “revised version [of lines 1–5] for public
consumption”: a “savage race” is revised to a “rugged people”.
The ironic interpretations of “Ulysses” may be the result of the modern tendency to consider the
narrator of a dramatic monologue as necessarily “unreliable”. According to critic Dwight Culler,
the poem has been a victim of revisionist readings in which the reader expects to reconstruct the
truth from a misleading narrator’s accidental revelations. (Compare the more obvious use of this

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