Gospel & Universe ❤️ Three Little Words

Tennyson’s Ulysses

The Arch - Literary Tradition - Homer, Dante, & Shakespeare - Keats & Byron - 19th Century England

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The Arch

Few of us can read Classical Greek or spend two dozen years ploughing through the vast corpus of human knowledge, only to realize that there’s a universe of knowledge always beyond our grasp. Yet the reality of ever-expanding knowledge is always at our finger-tips, always right in front of our noses. Expansion of consciousness is fundamental to our experience, ever since we were children.

Even in old age, this basic quest for insight and experience can be as strong as ever, as we see in Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (1833). In this short poem, Tennyson puts the metaphor of an arch (in bold below) into the mouth of one of the most powerful cultural and literary characters in world literature: the figure of Odysseus, or Ulysses in Latin. Ulysses is key to both of Homer’s great epics: in The Iliad he fights in the Trojan War and saves the day for the Greeks by coming up with the idea of the Trojan Horse; in The Odyssey he makes the quintessential epic journey, encountering along the way the tempting goddess Calypso, the crafty sorceress Circe, the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, and the symbolic yet all-too real sirens of the deep. In Homer’s version of the story, the great war hero makes this long dangerous journey back to his wife Penelope (on the island of Ithaca) and then reestablishes his power base. In Tennyson’s version of the story (which is influenced by Dante), Ulysses then yearns to be back out at sea, confronting the elements, and surmounting danger. He laments,

I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known—cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honored of them all,—
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Tennyson uses the arch as a general symbol of movement through experience, yet it’s important that it’s Odysseus who imagines this arch and yearns for more. If a man of such vast experience still wants to experience more out of life, then we can assume there’s no end to the desire to find new things, new challenges, new worlds, and new modes of experience.

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“Ulysses” is a short, brilliant poem that does many things at once. It can be read both as a Romantic extension of the Homeric epic, and as a reflection of the great epistemological and societal changes of 19th century England.

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Literary Tradition

Homer, Dante, & Shakespeare

In his poem Tennyson borrows most obviously from Homer and Dante, yet he also borrows from Shakespeare. These sources deepen the cultural impact of the arch — that is, of the depth of culture in the moment (going through the arch) and also the realization that the future will bring a never-ending series of arches or depths.

While Tennyson’s use of Homer and Dante is most obvious, his use of Shakespeare is more subtle and powerful. We obliquely see Hamlet’s disdain for inaction when Ulysses says it’s dull to “rust unburnished, and not to shine in use,” and when he says that it’s vile “to store and hoard” himself. Tennyson here suggests the uneasy, equivocating core of Hamlet, as well as the general unease that humans feel in their all-too limited skin — especially in the soliloquy where Hamlet complains, “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, / Seem to me all the uses of this world!” This soliloquy includes a lament that God has “fix’d / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter,” and thus prefigures the existential obsession with suicide. Tennyson thus imparts to his Greek hero the early Modern sensibility, including its alienation and angst, and its desire to escape this world, which Hamlet sees as “an unweeded garden, / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely.”

We see more clearly Homer’s depiction of the afterlife in Tennyson’s third section, where “The deep / Moans round with many voices.” We also clearly see Dante’s notion that Ulysses decides to leave Ithaca to make a final epic sea journey, and perhaps less explicitly the nautical imagery Dante uses in his extended metaphors for the spiritual journey. Again, however, the more subtle point can be traced back to Shakespeare than to Homer or Dante. In keeping with the epic journeys of Homer, Virgil, and Dante, Tennyson’s Ulysses refers to the possibility of meeting Achilles in an afterlife realm:

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

The poet repeats It may be, which could be an innocent repetition of It might happen, yet the repetition of these three little words might also suggest no afterlife (a watery oblivion) or a happy afterlife in some other land — what Hamlet refers to as the “undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns.” From this angle, the three little words It may be echo the perchance and the what dreams may come, which Hamlet uses when he suggests that we may — or may not — have dreams within the sleep of death. For Hamlet, the possibility of an afterlife isn’t certain, and for the Romantics and Victorians there’s even more reason to question whether or not we may have dreams after we die.

Keats & Byron

Tennyson’s poem also has much of the second generation Romantic in it, including the wanderlust of Shelley and Byron as well as the spirit of exploration Keats describes in his poem, “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,” written in 1816. Here Keats likens the exhilaration he feels reading Homer with the first European sighting of the Pacific Ocean (the historical details of the poem aren’t quite accurate, but the sentiment rings true):

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
    When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
    He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Tennyson’s emphasis on continual exploration also has a strong, albeit subtle, link to Byron. Like Byron’s Don Juan, Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is steeped in literary and epic references. Byron sets up epic models only to deflate them, and he pretends to offer a unified epic but instead gives his reader a never-ending story, one that just goes on, without clear message or import, until the author happens to die. What seems a unifying and complete version of culture and history becomes fragmentary and never-ending. This never-ending yet epic quality is also clear in Tennyson’s poem: Tennyson picks up from where Homer and Dante left off, and he leaves us with a yearning for further exploration rather than the satisfaction of arriving at the end. All of this is relevant to agnosticism, where culture and knowledge is never complete, and where the idea of a final truth is superseded by an infinity of possible truths.

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19th Century England

That agnosticism arises in mid 19th century England is no surprise: we can palpably sense the spirit of intellectual exploration in poets like Keats, Byron, and Tennyson, who were alive and open to the changes all around them. These poets were aware that in the late 18th and early 19th centuries English and French intellectuals and scientists were making monumental discoveries: the link between Sanskrit and Latin by Sir William Jones; the age of the Earth by James Hutton; the laws of genetical inheritance by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck; the decipherment of the hieroglyphics by Young, Champollion, etc. Second-generation Romantic poets and Victorian poets like Tennyson projected a readiness to embrace these changes, to face the mysteries of the world and say, I don’t know, but I want to know more.

Tennyson is writing about Ulysses, yet what he says is applicable to humanity in general and to 19th century England in particular. Romantic and Victorian England was home to the Industrial Revolution and to many of the radical changes that the world would experience in the coming years, especially in regard to democracy, social reform, knowledge, and the application of science to industry and everyday life. The poem was written in 1833, at the very beginning of the Victorian Age, one year after the Great Reform Act expanded suffrage in 1832, and the same year the Slavery Abolition Act banned slavery in the British Empire. In its march toward modernity, England might be seen as Ulysses, whose “gray spirit yearn[s] in desire / To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” All of this is course wonderfully Romantic, yet there is also the possibility that Ulysses will take the journey Dante gives him — to the ends of the earth, where he is shipwrecked and sinks. Dante goes a step further and sticks the Greek hero in his latinate Hell. Leaving that point aside for the moment, one can imagine that Tennyson uses sinking star to suggest height and nobility, but also the possibility that the higher they rise the harder they fall.

Tennyson hints at the general trend of scientific discovery, yet he couldn’t have known where this trend would lead specifically. Ulysses reference to “a sinking star” and to a place “Beyond the utmost bound of human thought” subtly suggest that it might lead to somewhere we cannot expect, and somewhere which isn’t necessarily concerned about human thought or experience. One possible destination might be a place that lies beyond the comforting human notion that “God so loved the world…” At least, this is one way of looking at the implications of evolutionary theory and the decipherment of cuneiform.

Tennyson could have read about Hutton and Lamarck, yet he couldn’t have predicted the two discoveries that circumscribed the likelihood of a clear divine Plan centred on humanity. The first of these discoveries is well-known: in 1859 Charles Darwin articulated in his Origin of Species the mechanics of evolution, thus giving for the first time a coherent scientific explanation of how it is that we got to become who we are. The second is not as well known: in 1872 George Smith read to the Society of Biblical Archaeology fragments of his upcoming translation of the epic Gilgamesh, which he titled The Chaldaean Account of Genesis (1876). While it’s understandably overshadowed by Darwin’s Origin of Species, Gilgamesh gives a rich historical context — and a philological limit — to the otherworldly claims of the Bible. It’s one thing to assert that the Bible is just a book, written by men who lived within the limitations and assumptions of their age; it’s quite another to demonstrate that it contains a foundational story that is borrowed, even in its details, from a previous civilization. The discovery of evolution and the decipherment of Gilgamesh show that our existence can’t be summed up in one book, however holy we may believe it to be.

Philosophers like Aristotle and theologians like Moses (assuming that Moses was in fact the author of the Pentateuch) remain influential writers, yet their claims that the Earth is still and is orbited by the sun were destroyed by astronomers in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Classical and Biblical claims were countered not because they weren’t helpful or didn’t make sense at the time, but because our understanding increased and we eventually saw a greater context within which the thinking of Aristotle and Moses operated. The Bible ceased to be the book that explained everything when we saw the equally conclusive facts of evolution and philology: Creation started to look more like evolution, and the Bible started to look more like a series of texts that underwent the well-known editing processes of borrowing, redacting, adding, and refining.

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What Tennyson says of experience can be said of knowledge itself. Every gate of knowledge that we step through leads to new avenues of thought, brave new worlds that we never thought about before, and dark forests in which we may lose our way again. As Dante writes 700 years ago, in the middle of our life’s path we can lose ourselves in a dark forest. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura. But with evolution and cuneiform, genetics and Hubble’s telescope, we can’t say that our path is also somehow pre-determined or that we’ll end up like Dante’s Virgil, who, frightened by the dark forest and its beasts, is guided back onto the right path by Beatrice, as if by a compassionate and lucky star:

Da questa tema a ciò che tu ti solve, To free you from this fear

dirotti perch' io venni e quel ch'io 'ntesi I'll tell you why I came and what I heard

nel primo punto che di te mi dolve. when first I felt compassion for you.

Since the Victorian Age, the notion of heavenly intervention has become more difficult to maintain. People may continue to feel it and believe in it, but it can’t be so elegantly packaged into an overall system. The more knowledge we gain about the world — about sacred texts, the way nature works, and the vastness of outer space — the more we see that of the gaining of knowledge there’s no end. And with greater knowledge, we see the limits of our previous knowledge. Our ignorance is revealed to us, not as some fatal error, but as a challenge.

When Tennyson wrote that Ulysses (and by extension 19th century England) will “follow knowledge like a sinking star,” he didn’t count on this knowledge going beyond that star. He didn’t count on evolution, DNA, or the Hubble telescope. He didn’t count on these particular things, yet his metaphors of the sinking star and the ever-present horizon suggest that he wouldn’t have been terribly surprised.

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