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Blogs > pilot12612 > Prose and Passion

Ulysses - Alfred Lord Tennyson - Dare For One More Journey  

pilot12612 54M
22 posts
10/31/2012 7:42 pm

Last Read:
11/5/2012 7:49 pm
Ulysses - Alfred Lord Tennyson - Dare For One More Journey
This is one of my favorite<b> poems.
</font></b>It follows up on the protagonist from Homer’s The Odyssey after he has finally made it home. However, this poem also concerns the poet’s own personal journey - it was composed in the first few weeks after Tennyson learned of the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833.

Ulysses, who symbolizes the grieving poet, proclaims his resolution to push onward in spite of the awareness that “death closes all”. As Tennyson himself stated, the poem expresses his own “need of going forward and braving the struggle of life” after the loss of his friend.

The poem’s final line, “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,”

Here is a small piece – if you like, you can google it to see the entire thing.

Ulysses
Alfred Lord Tennyson

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, 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 had 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,
'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.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in the 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.


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