Written in blank verse, the dramatic monologue depicts Tennyson’s belief in the sense of compromise that the Victorian Age came to make: between aristocracy and democracy; religion and science; faith and doubt; monarchy and the parliament; and the old order and the new changes. Being a representative poem of the Victorian period, it voices the doubts of the protagonist the old man Ulysses, the mythical character Odysseus of Homer’s epic Odyssey, and this regaining of confidence and strength as the poem progresses to its conclusion: his own doubt between accepting back his own kingdom after his ten years of wandering in the Mediterranean and eating sleeping and being forgotten, or choosing to “drink life to the lees” and “follow knowledge like a sinking star,/Beyond the utmost bound of human thought ast he has already “enjoy’d greatly” and “suffer’d grately” and known “cities of men/ And manners, climates, councils, governments” and got “honour’d of them all” during his travels. After much confrontation with “doubt”, finally he compromises his estate to give it to his “own son Telemachus” and invite his peers to begin another journey to “sail beyond the sunset” as he feels that he has “one equal temper of heroic heart” and he has determined to “strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”, that is in the spirit of the Victorian sense of discovery, search for knowledge and power in the field of natural sciences, geology, medicine, human evolution and many other newly emerging fields of knowledge, working day and night “beyond sunset” as the sun never set in the British colonial empire because it was spread almost throughout the globe— some of the colonies experience daylight at the same time some other colonies experienced night.
The poem, on the other hand, seems to be an allegory that on one level, it presents the actions, confrontations, and decisions of the mythical hero of Homer’s epic; on the other level, it depicts a Victorian man caught in doubt and his realization that the “old order changeth giving pace top the new” so he should “sail beyond the sunset, and the baths/ Of the western stars” before he dies, as Ulysses says “Tho’ much is takes, [yet] much abides”.
© Dr. Sanjeev Vishwakarma
Literary Latitude 