Ulysses Close Reading

While The Odyssey follows Odysseus to the assumed ultimate goal of home, the poem “Ulysses” narrates the impatience and frustration that he faces when he has been home for “three suns”. Clearly, he is restless and wants to chase adventure again, as he states that he “cannot rest from travel” and comments, “how dull it is to pause, to make an end. / To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!” His very thoughts are enjambed, broken with the urgency of his wanderlust.

As Ulysses romanticizes his past, saying that “All times I have enjoyed / Greatly, have suffered greatly” Tennyson uses the double meaning of “greatly” to express not only enjoyment and suffering on an emotionally intense scale, but also to imply that Ulysses sees his past as Great with a capital G. However, his “aged wife” and the “savage race” of his kingdom are content to “hoard, and sleep, and feed” but “know not me.” They do not recognize his Greatness. He longs to return to his glorious past journeys, and in the end, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” But if he wanted to strive, to seek, and to find, why does he acknowledge that he will not yield anything from it? He seems to recognize that he will never satisfy his addiction to his past glory, that future pointless wandering without yield would not soothe his existential angst. Really, all he wants is to be recognized and validated for his past glory and adventure, to find meaning in his responsibility to his people, and to have a better “yield” than an unhappy home life. He wants to exert the same influence and change upon the home he longed so many years to return to as he did in all his long years of travel.