Comparing Ulysses' (Tennyson) and Macbeth's (Shakespeare) Attitude Toward Power

In Victorian times, Britain was a powerful country. There were unlimited opportunities for mainly the upper class people to broaden their knowledge by going to new places and experience the foreign cultures. When Lord Tennyson wrote this poem, he was grieving over his best friend’s death. By writing this poem he was able to express his emotional feeling as well as to persuade him to let it go. He also had the opportunities to tell people that it is “never too late to seek a newer world”. For examples, Ulysses’ new world would be the after life world and Lord Tennyson’s new world would be the world without his best friend.

At the end of Macbeth, the moral we get is that never to cross the line of Divine Order. During Jacobean time, they believed that the duty of the King is chosen by God: They believed that every living organism has an order and it is decided by God, this is call the Divine Order. If one decides to go against the Divine Order, like killing the King to be the monarchy himself then, he had done something that is very morbid during the Jacobeans: going against God. Shakespeare tried show that by the cost of Macbeth have to face after he had murdered the King, one example is that he lost his respects from his courtiers and at the end he was all by himself. Jacobeans were also very superstitious; they believed that witches are evil because they worship demon, so if there was a plague or a natural disaster, they blamed on the witches: they are first put to trials and then was executed, mainly hanged or burned. Because Shakespeare made Macbeth associate with the witches by talking and worse of all trusting them, that made Macbeth evil. Shakespeare did this to please his King, King James, as he was against the supernatural and was able help King James to spread the evilness of the witches through his play.

The poem, “Ulysses” started by a slow rhythm. Lord Tennyson managed this by using the words with long vowels such as, “hoard, and sleep, and feed”. These words give us the sense of dullness and mundane, which was how Ulysses feels at the beginning. However, as we go further down the poem, the dullness was decrease as he started to talk about his adventurous days.