![]() He spent seven of the ten years it took him to get home from the Trojan War a captive on Calypso’s island. As one Victorian commentator, Goldwin Smith, put it in 1855, Ulysses wants to take to the seas again ‘merely to relieve his ennui’ and that ‘he roams aimlessly’ since ‘he intends to roam, but stands for ever a listless and melancholy figure on the shore.’Īnd even in the poem that inspired Tennyson’s own, Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus spends more time stranded on an island or sitting about than he does actually doing something. Or, if he does believe it, he may be deluding himself. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are We are not now that strength which in old days It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,Īnd see the great Achilles, whom we knew. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: The sounding furrows for my purpose holds Push off, and sitting well in order smite The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Old age hath yet his honour and his toil ĭeath closes all: but something ere the end, ![]() ![]() The thunder and the sunshine, and opposedįree hearts, free foreheads-you and I are old Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me. There lies the port the vessel puffs her sail: Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere This labour, by slow prudence to make mild To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,. To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!Īs tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on lifeįrom that eternal silence, something more,Ī bringer of new things and vile it wereįor some three suns to store and hoard myself,īeyond the utmost bound of human thought. Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades Myself not least, but honour’d of them all Īnd drunk delight of battle with my peers, Much have I seen and known cities of menĪnd manners, climates, councils, governments, That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |