Tennyson’s “Ulysses”—A Re-Interpretation

TENNYSON'S "ULYSSES"-A RE-INTERPRETATION E. J. CHIASSON I T has long been recognized that Tennyson's Idylls are, among other things, the allegorical presentation of ideas which had found their place in a large number of poems, from "The Palace of Art" to "Lucretius" and "The Ancient Sage."! Such fidelity to a set of ideas need not surprise us in a poet who had always felt that "only under the inspiration of ideals, and with his 'sword bathed in heaven,' can a man combat the cynical indifference, the intellectual selfishness, the sloth of will, the utilitarian materialism of a transition age."2 Yet despite this willingness on the part of critics to arrange much of the Tennyson canon in this perfectly convincing pattern, little attention has been paid to the intractability of "Ulysses," that is to say, to its virtual refusal to submit to such an arrangement. As a result "Ulysses" .continues to be, what it has always been, something of a "sport" in Tennyson criticism. Although I do not intend to fit "Ulysses" into such a pattern by detailed references to the Idylls, I shall try to show that critical attention to the poem has stopped short of placing it precisely where it belongs, namely among the many expressions of Tennyson 's conviction that religious faith is mandatory for the multitudinous needs of life. Lacking such a view of the poem, 'critics of "Ulysses" (no longer enthusiastically restricting themselves to an admiration of its "gleam" qualities) think of it generally as a poem of relatively unresolved antinomies . One critic, regarding it as, at least intentionally, a "gleam" poem, is of course struck by the familiar disturbing Dantean conception of Ulysses' character, and concludes that "Ulysses" is a brilliant failure in which the "details are inconsistent, the reasoning specious, the whole a kind of brilliantly whited sepulchre...."8 Another critic,4, !F. E. L. Priestley, "Tennyson's Idylls," UTQ, XIX (1949), 48, lists some of the works which fit into this pattern, but his intention is to include "the whole of Tennyson's poetry." I do not know that Dr. Priestley subscribes to the view of "Ulysses" which I elaborate in this paper. 2H. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (London, 1898), II, 129. ap. F. Baum, Tennyson, Sixty Years After (Chapel Hill, 1948), 303. 4E. D. H. Johnson, The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry (Princeton, 1952). J-ohnson recognizes, of course, not only Tennyson's suspicion of the antiwsocial devation to ·the life of a Sixty Years After, 301. What I view here as disingenuousness , perfectly consistent with Ulysses' previously known character, Baum views as simply another example of Tennyson's failure to maintain consistency in his characterization. 12Baum, ibid., thinks that the latter part d the poem represents Ulysses' "real dignity and nobility." He recognizes however that this nobility conflicts with the irresponsibility and contemptuousness of UI)'sses in the beginning and middle of the poem. His conclusion is that Tennyson is guilty of "muddled thinking," and that "the Byronic was probably not intended for our ears, perhaps not entirely clear in the poet's." Another inference, as the whole tenor of this article suggests, is possible. 408 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Domestication ...," contemptuous of duty and the softer affections, proud in his relationships with the gods, disingenuous and contemptu~ ous towards his own son and towards his own people; a man who pursues life with thoroughgoing indiscrimination, and who reaches at best a vague and undirected respect for the life of intellect. For Ulysses, in his last burst of oratory, is completely vague as to what he means by "to strive, to seek, to find." What it is he will not yield to is uncertain, unless it be the limitation inseparable from the orientation of his energies, affective and intellectual, towards some recognized hierarchical system. It is incredible to suppose that Tennyson, in the light of his assercion that "Ulysses" was a simpler statement than In Memoriam of the necessity of braving the struggle of life, should have contradicted himself so abysmally. For the Byronic catholicity of Ulysses, compounded as it is of marital and social irresponsibility, pursuit of sensation, and adoration of the naked...