In the Library
Ulysses
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1842
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 1k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
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Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
Tennyson wrote this weeks after Arthur Hallam, the friend he loved most in the world, died at twenty-two. It is not a consolation. It reads like a man quietly packing a bag. Ulysses has everything the Odyssey promised him, and it is a rock. He calls himself an idle king by a still hearth among barren crags, meting out laws to a people who hoard and sleep and feed and do not know him. So he hands the sceptre to his son, walks down to the beached ship, and asks the grey crew who toiled and thought beside him to put out west in old age with no thought of return. It is not too late, he tells them, to seek a newer world. The ache is that he is magnificent and he is also walking out on Ithaca and everyone in it, and the poem refuses to choose. Its closing vow is carved on the cross that Scott's surviving men raised over the Antarctic ice, spoken by an old man with nothing left to sail toward but the dark.