![]() ![]() Well that's exactly how Ulysses feels, only he doesn't want to get back to school he wants to get back out on the ocean, where he could die or, barring that, spend the rest of his life wandering around, never to return home again. You know that feeling you get about three weeks into summer vacation, where you start to run out of things to do? You've been to the water park, you've slept in for the last 21 days, you haven't thought about school at all, and finally you ask yourself, now what? That feeling escalates until, come August, you're so bored you're almost glad school is starting again, even though after two weeks you'll wish it were still summer. What is Ulysses About and Why Should I Care? Indeed, Tennyson famously claimed that the poem described in part his own "need of going forward and braving the struggle of life" after his friend's death. He also wanted to keep living life, taking both its ups and downs in stride in the same way as Ulysses. Tennyson's presentation of the Ulysses myth reflects to some degree his own desire to get over Hallam's death and keep living it wasn't enough for Tennyson to achieve a state of ease and tranquility (like Ulysses did when he got back to Ithaca). The poem is a long monologue spoken by Ulysses detailing how bored he is in Ithaca (an island off the coast of Greece) and how he wants to get as much out of life as he can. Tennyson's poem fuses both Homer and Dante's versions of the story in the poem, Ulysses has made it home (Homer), but he wants to go sailing around the world again (Dante). ![]() But unlike Tennyson, Dante condemns Ulysses for irresponsible adventure-seeking. Dante's Inferno, a much later work about a poet's journey through Hell, actually describes this voyage, though in a slightly different way in Dante's account, Ulysses never returns home to Ithaca and instead chooses to continue sailing, as he does in Tennyson's poem. According to Homer, once Odysseus made it home he still had to take one more voyage, though that voyage is only mentioned, never made. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, however, he wrote "Ulysses." You might have heard of Ulysses, or Odysseus, as he is called in Homer's Odyssey, the epic poem that narrates his long (10 years!) journey home from the the Trojan War. Hallam's death devastated Tennyson seventeen years later he wrote a long poem about it called In Memoriam. In October of 1833, Alfred Tennyson learned of the untimely death of his close friend and Arthur Henry Hallam. ![]()
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