9/4/2023 0 Comments Ulysses tennysonIn Homer, Ulysses will die “far from the sea” ( Odyssey, 11, l. The two great authorities, Homer and Dante-or, within their respective fictions, Tiresias and Ulysses himself-disagree about how the story will end. Tennyson’s poem is a dramatic monologue, spoken by Ulysses as he decides to leave the Homeric Ithaca to which he has returned and undertake the journey predicted for him by Tiresias. 114– 115 Cary translates: “the short remaining watch, that yet / Our senses have to wake”). But his words are powerful and striking, especially the famous exhortation not to waste the little time that remains to them in “the brief vigil of our senses:” “questa tanto picciola vigilia / d’i nostri sensi ch’è del rimanente” (26, ll. His virtue is not Christian, and so Dante puts him in the hell he has visited in the classical myths. Cary that Tennyson would have read at the time, was that he and his men “were not form’d to live the life of brutes / But virtue to pursue and knowledge high” ( Inferno 26, ll. The reason for this, he says in the English translation by H. He has Ulysses gather his men together, perhaps in Ithaca (as Tennyson obviously thought) to make one final journey. Neither the Odyssey nor any other surviving work tell the story that was clearly known to Homer’s audience, but Dante invented it. In Homer, Tiresias tells Ulysses (as we will call him here for consistency) that he will return home to Ithaca, but that eventually he will make one more journey and die in a land so far from the world he knows that it will be entirely alien to him. Therefore, Tennyson is synthesizing two traditions and two sources, not simply adding a link in a chain. The Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) had not read the ancient Greek poet Homer but only accounts of the Homeric epics his Ulysses came largely from the Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid. There are also echoes of William Shakespeare’s Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida. The main sources of the poem are book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus (Ulysses is the Latinized form of his name) goes to the underworld and has his future foretold by Tiresias the prophet (this is the scene also in which Ajax turns away from Odysseus, one of the touchstones in Longinus’s description of the sublime) and the 26th canto of Dante’s Inferno, where Dante is led by his guide Virgil to meet Ulysses and hear his story. Tennyson himself said of “Ulysses” in a note that it “was more written with the feeling of loss upon me than many poems in In Memoriam,” a formulation revised in a later note to read that it “gave my feeling about the need of going forward, and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam.” However, it was written at age 24, nine years earlier, after the death in 1833 of Arthur Henry Hallam, the most important single person in Tennyson’s life, and the subject of his great elegy In Memoriam A.H.H. Ulysses, a perennial favorite and one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s greatest poems, appeared in the 1842 volume of Poems that made Tennyson’s name.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |