‘Ulysses’ Notes

Stanza 1 Lines 1-5 Scornful tone. Nothing agrees with his temperament. Dissatisfaction/impatient with life of inaction Adjectives :‘idle’, ‘still’, ‘barren’, ‘aged’ – sterile, dry connotations. Scorn in ‘I mete and dole’ : measuring out, like an accountant a justice which is ‘unfair’ to a people that to him are ‘savage’ Contempt for people who ‘hoard and sleep and feed’. Note grating contemptuous monosyllables to describe in animalistic terms his people. A man out of step with his position and people. Ends with ‘and know not me’ Maybe a hint of self-centredness? Thoughtless towards the loyal Penelope? Contempt for a sterile, limited present.

Stanza 2 Lines 6-33 Static life not for him. Travel! Movement. CONTRAST with life of people who ‘hoard and sleep and feed’. Life of action praised. His is language of consumption : ‘I will drink/Life to the lees as opposed to the language of preservation to describe the people of Ithaca who ‘hoard and sleep and feed.’ Total involvement with life, living, adventure, even dangers and suffering: ‘I will drink/Life to the lees’. He has ‘enjoyed/ Greatly, have suffered greatly. Repetition emphasises grand scale to everything he does.

Stanza 2 (contd.) Forward drive given by enjambment (e.g. lines 6 to 11 ) More heroic quality than those canny people on Ithaca. Never satisfied, he is ‘roaming with a hungry heart’ while the people of Ithaca ‘hoard and sleep and feed’ Dissatisfaction v. contentment. Movement v. inaction. Proud of the Ulysses legend: ‘I am become a name.’ (hint of a certain vanity) /Delights/ revels in telling of his adventures. Rejoices in his experiences: ‘Much have I seen and known; cities of men/ And manners, climates, councils, governments,/Myself not least. List emphasises both the multiplicity of his experiences but his own importance in them.

Stanza 2 (contd.) But richness of past experience is not enough. Note richness of the metaphor: ‘.. all experience is an arch wherethrough/Gleams that untravelled world,...’ Other adventures beckon. Love of movement/hatred of the static: ‘How dull it is to pause, to make an end’ referring back to Ithaca. Sees himself in image of a rusting disused sword if left inactive.

Stanza 2 (contd.) Contempt again at word ‘hoard’, seeing his present state as ‘grey’.

Reflecting on Stanza 2 As Ulysses remembers past adventures and looks forward to new ones, tone changes. Stanza 1: static, sterile state described in scornful tone. See early quotes. Stanza 2: tone more flowing and lyrical as considers past and a possible new future. Freedom for his egocentricity here, no longer confined. Stanza ends on exuberant note! How is new tone created?

Reflecting on Stanza 2 Frequent use of enjambment. Find examples. Use of repetition increases intensity of his mood. ‘I have enjoyed/ Greatly, have suffered greatly,..’ + Lists emphasise the breadth of his experiences: ‘Much have I seen and known; cities of men/ And manners, climates, councils, governments/ Myself not least. (builds to climax of importance)

Stanza 3 Tone and language change again when he considers his son, Telemachus. Affectionate: ‘mine own’, ‘well-loved of me’. BUT language shows all the qualities he is praising in Telemachus: correct and prudent, but not exciting. Rhythms are more subdued and controlled; nouns drabber, more abstract. Gone are images of swords, arches and ‘ringing plains’: now there is talk of ‘slow prudence’, ‘soft degrees’, ‘the useful and the good’. What have we learned in the last stanza about what Ulysses thinks of moderate behaviour ? What does he privately think of people being subdued ‘to the useful and the good’?

Telemachus defined in rather negative terms: ‘Most blameless is he’, ‘decent not to fail/ In offices of tenderness’ This is the responsible king talking, not the private man who was exposed to us in stanza 1. But intelligent enough to know that states need men like Telemachus; they are just not his kind of men. These are men of ideas, not men of action. Perhaps implied sadness that his son is so little like his father, but nevertheless he accepts gracefully their differences.

Stanza 4 Addresses here not so much us the readers but his mariners directly. Moving picture of the ‘vessel that puffs her sail’ against the ‘gloom’ of ‘the dark broad seas’. Suggests the insignificance of Ulysses action in the face of inevitable death. Note, too, the references to the gathering night (death?). Here now the talk is not of people who ‘hoard and sleep and feed’ but mariners who have ‘toiled, and wrought, and thought’. The world of action is once again re-discovered and rejoiced in.

Stanza 4 Note the vagueness of Ulysses’ ambition: He hopes somewhat vaguely for ‘a newer world’ ‘:but something ere the end,/Some work of noble note, may yet be done’ ‘It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles’

Stanza 4 Faces up to the fact that they may end in either hell for ‘the gulfs may wash us down’ (to the underworld) or in mariners’ heaven in the ‘Happy Isles’ along with fellow heroes. But either is acceptable ; it is the going forward that matters. Hypnotic power of lines through repetition of phrases like ‘It may be..’, ‘much is taken, much abides’, and of the repeated action infinitives of ‘to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.’ The deliberate emphasis of the iambic pentameters in the final line drives the poem to a heroic close which refuses to bow to the inevitable.