kimerajamm
Joined: 28 Nov 2010
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 Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2011 9:42 am Post subject: Tennyson completed |
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Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move. (19–21)
Observing their burdensome prosodic effect, the poet Matthew Arnold remarked, "these three lines by themselves take up nearly as much time as a whole book of the Iliad."[3] Many of the poem's clauses carry over into the following line; this enjambment emphasizes Ulysses' restlessness and dissatisfaction.[4]
[edit] Form
The poem's seventy lines of blank verse are presented as a dramatic monologue. Scholars disagree on how Ulysses' speech functions in this format; it is not necessarily clear to whom Ulysses is speaking, if anyone, and from what location. Some see the verse turning from a soliloquy to a public address, as Ulysses seems to speak to himself in the first movement, then to turn to an audience as he introduces his son, and then to relocate to the seashore where he addresses his mariners.[5] In this interpretation, the comparatively direct and honest language of the first movement is set against the more politically minded tone of the last two movements. For example, the second paragraph (33–43) about Telemachus, in which Ulysses muses again about domestic life, is a "revised version [of lines 1–5] for public consumption":[6] a "savage race" is revised to a "rugged people".
The ironic interpretations of "Ulysses" may be the result of the modern tendency to consider the narrator of a dramatic monologue as necessarily "unreliable". According to critic Dwight Culler, the poem has been a victim of revisionist readings in which the reader expects to reconstruct the truth from a misleading narrator's accidental revelations.[7] (Compare the more obvious use of this approach in Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess".) Culler himself views "Ulysses" as a dialectic in which the speaker weighs the virtues of a contemplative and an active approach to life;[8] Ulysses moves through four emotional stages that are self-revelatory, not ironic: beginning with his rejection of the barren life to which he has returned in Ithaca, he then fondly recalls his heroic past, recognizes the validity of Telemachus' method of governing, and with these thoughts plans another journey.[9]
[edit] Publication history
Tennyson completed the poem on 20 October 1833,[10] but it was not published until 1842, in his second collection of Poems. Unlike many of Tennyson's other important poems, "Ulysses" was not revised after its publication.[11] Tennyson originally blocked out the poem in four paragraphs; it has, however, been printed with both three and four paragraphs, structures that affect the analysis of Ulysses' narration. With three paragraphs, the poem is divided at lines 33 and 44; with four, the five-line introduction becomes its own movement. In this four-movement version, the first and third are thematically parallel, but may be read as interior and exterior monologues, respectively.tracy anderson dvd
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