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  • Eight Reflections of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”
  • James Nohrnberg (bio)

In Memoriam: Douglas Bush, Dwight Culler, Edgar Shannon

I had ambition not only to go farther than any one had been before, but as far as it was possible for man to go.

——The Circumnavigator, Captain James Cook, R.N.1

1. An Anxiety of Influence2

I dwell in sunny Ithaca . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Many islands lie about it quite close to one another, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . She herself sits low-lying, farthest out to sea Toward dusk, and they are apart toward dawn and the sun, Rugged but good for bringing up young men.

——Odyssey 9.21–27, trans. Albert Cook3

Alfred Tennyson attributed Ulysses’ determination to persevere up to the last, in “Ulysses,” to his own resolute choice in favor of life and survival upon the traumatic news of the death of friend, soul-mate, and intending future brother-in-law Arthur Hallam (1833). A few years earlier the two Cambridge undergraduates considered printing their poems together in a single volume—Hallam’s father successfully insisted the project be abandoned.4 The publication might have included each poet’s “Timbuctoo,” written for the University’s annually awarded Chancellor’s Medal. Tennyson’s prevailed (1829), and Hallam’s note on his own effort—asserting the superiority of his friend’s prize-winning entry—Alfred himself managed to suppress, upon the impending re-publication of Arthur’s remains by his father.

A major effort, Hallam’s “Timbuctoo” is written in the Dantean terza rima earlier used for his “Farewell to the South”; there his “one deep resolve” (l. 629) was to serve an ideal uniting virtue, truth, and poetry:

I have an oath, [End Page 101] Graven in the heart, that I will never drift Before the varying gale in aimless sloth Of purpose, like a battered wreck: but firm Intendment on the base of my young troth, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shall rear the fabric of a thinking life.

(ll. 630–636, Writings, p. 25)

Similar determination to live with intellectual purpose infuses the search for Timbuctoo, yet Hallam anxiously anticipates the discovery’s destroying itself as pure Platonic idea: enhanced by “Imagination”—which also “decked [the] unknown caves” of “a land . . . far from human sight . . . In the lone West” (ll. 1–4)—it will be contaminated by “Discovery”:

Perchance thou art too pure, and dost surpass    Too far amid th’ Ideas ranged high    In the Eternal Reason’s perfectness,

To our deject and most imbased eye    To look unharmed on thy integrity,    Symbol of Love, and Truth, and all that cannot die.

(ll. 115–120, Writings, p. 41)

Hallam probably refers to the celebrated veiled statue at Sais in Egypt, which ruined the too-curious violater’s peace of mind for the rest of his life,5 but the motif of losing a paradise by finding it particularly attaches to the Spanish in New Spain, and this example underlies another poem from this period of the poets’ lives, Tennyson’s own “Anacaona.”

Tennyson’s stated, high-minded reasons for suppressing Hallam’s note on his “Timbuctoo”—“The poem [Hallam’s] is everyway so much better than that wild and unmethodized performance of my own, that even his praise on such a subject would be painful”6—may have been quite sincere; but it is hard not to notice that Hallam’s poem, as much as Tennyson’s, invokes the discovery of a far-off paradise, a “long-lost Atlantis,”7 but only Hallam’s refers the search to the brave voyage of Columbus:

Years lapsed in silence, and that holy ground    Was still an Eden, shut from sight; and few    Brave souls in its idea solace found. In the last days a man arose, who knew    That ancient legend from his infancy.    Yea, visions on that child’s enmarvailed view Had flashed intuitive science.

(ll. 37–43)

Others’ hostility and advancing years “never quenched his faith” (l. 48): [End Page 102]

       to that faith he added search, and still    As fevering with fond love of th’ unknown shore,    From learning’s fount he strove his thirst to fill. But always Nature seemed to meet the power    Of his high mind, to aid, and to reward    His reverent...

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