The content of Tennyson’s poem, however, follows the great Italian poet Dante’s version of the character more than Homer’s. In fact, Tennyson’s choice of the Latinized name “Ulysses” as the poem’s title emphasizes this connection. In Canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno (one of the three parts of his great work The Divine Comedy), Dante visits the many levels of Hell and meets Ulysses, who is being punished there for his deceitfulness, a fact that also may affect one’s interpretation of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” as being less than the “ideal” hero. Ulysses tells Dante about his final voyage and describes his quest to sail beyond the prescribed limits of the world at Gibraltar, the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Dante’s Ulysses professes an attitude of persistence and tireless seeking that is much like that of Tennyson’s version of the character.
There has been much critical controversy about the character of Ulysses and his sincerity — whether or not he is meant to embody the great adventurous spirit of Homer’s Odysseus, or whether his continuing quest represents a shirking of familial responsibility and even veiled disillusionment with the life he tried so desperately to get back to throughout Homer’s Odyssey. For Ulysses describes Ithaca as a place of “barren crags,” and he disparagingly refers to his “aged wife” Penelope and to his boredom with the duties of being a king. He metes out laws to a people who sound more animalistic than human in their “hoarding, sleeping and feeding,” and who, Ulysses tells us, “know not me,” despite the fact that he tells us a few lines later that “I am become a name.”
In the third stanza, Ulysses refers to his son, Telemachus, and his statement, “This is my son” may be intended to suggest that Telemachus is standing near Ulysses and that the old man is introducing his son to the people he is addressing. Ulysses praises Telemachus’ virtues here, mentioning his “slow prudence” and the fact that he is “centred in the sphere / of common duties,” but in praising his son, he also points out a significant contrast in their personalities. “He works his work, I mine,” the old king says; a statement that has encouraged a number of critics to read a tone of irony into this “praise” of his son. In Ulysses’ description of him, Telemachus is not, after all, the kind of man Ulysses himself strives to be. Readers who are familiar with Homer may remember the great lengths to which Telemachus went in the Odyssey in both searching for his father and in protecting his father’s home from the suitors. Recalling these details may encourage the interpretation that Ulysses undervalues his son, as his brief mention of Penelope as “an aged wife” undervalues the great lengths that Penelope underwent in fending off scores of suitors and in remaining loyal to her husband in the twenty years that he was absent from Ithaca.
Tennyson began composing “Ulysses” in 1833, immediately following the shocking and sudden death of his closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. In the ten years following Hallam’s death, Tennyson worked on a grand elegy for his friend, a series of many short poems lamenting his friend’s death that he eventually published in 1850 as InMemoriam A. H. H. But Tennyson took care to point out that “Ulysses” was also inspired by the death of Hallam, and in his biography of his father, Tennyson’s son Hallam Tennyson recorded that Tennyson said, “The poem was written soon after Arthur Hallam’s death, and it gave my feeling about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam.” Tennyson again compared the poem to In Memoriam in a comment to his friend James Knowles that, “there is more about myself in ’ Ulysses,’ which was written under the sense of loss and all that had gone by but that still life must be fought out to the end. It was more written with the feeling of his loss upon me than many of the poems in In Memoriam.” Tennyson’s emphasis of this poem as an expression of his feelings concerning his friend’s death suggests that one consider whether or not there is a message in the poem concerning death and dying. Perhaps “Ulysses” is meant to be a encouraging poem, suggesting that one ought not give in to death, but instead live life to the fullest. Some readers have even interpreted Ulysses’ reference to seeing the “great Achilles” again in the afterlife as a veiled reference to Tennyson’s own hope that he would one day be reunited with his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam.
Ulysses’ rhetorical stance in dedicating himself to “drink / Life to the lees,” to “follow knowledge like a sinking star,” and “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” most frequently has been taken at face value by readers in the Victorian period, and in the twentieth century. The Victorians, particularly, saw this as a truly noble expression of a spirit tireless in the face of death and relentless in the quest for new accomplishments and discoveries. This perception of the poem’s moral is what has made it one of Tennyson’s most widely and consistently popular pieces. Nevertheless, Tennyson’s statement that the poem was written “about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life” should not be taken as a simple commendation of Ulysses’ point of view. As it was difficult to decide how to interpret Ulysses as a character, it is difficult to determine whether or not we are intended to see his will to live and his desire for adventure as honorable qualities, or rather to see that his wish for escape and for constant stimulation indicates a resistance to accept the idea of his own death. There may be another way to interpret the theme of death in the poem. Tennyson’s Ulysses does seem to be preoccupied with his own mortality in such statements as “Life piled on life / Were all too little, and of one to me / Little remains,” and in how he looks to every hour as an opportunity to evade death, saying that “every hour is saved / From that eternal silence, something more, / A bringer of new things.” Ulysses also brings up the issue of death when he says, “Death closes all: but something ere the end, / Some work of noble note, may yet be done.” Is Ulysses obsessed with dying, is he merely trying to get the most out of life, or is he looking for a final opportunity to garner a bit more fame before it is too late? Is he the great and noble hero of Homer’s epic, or the deceitful Ulysses of Dante, shirking his responsibilities to a loyal family and kingdom? The brilliance of this poem, as readers throughout the years have continued to discover, lies in its many possibilities for interpretation and in the many differing messages a reader may take from it.