Tennyson and Ulysses

Tennyson wrote “Ulysses” shortly after his best friend’s death. In the poem we hear Ulysses, home from the Wars for only a short time, speaking of his readiness for new adventure. He begins by saying “It little profits an idle king/by this still hearth, among these barren crags,/match’d with an aged wife I mete and dole/unequal laws unto a savage race.” He feels useless, too old to rule over his wild people; the hearth, recognized as the central area of the home and symbolic of the state of family life is still. It being still, and he an “idle” king, tells us he feels stagnant, that being home makes him feel his age, though throughout the world people love him, respect him, honor him: “cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments,/myself not least, but honour’d of them all.”

Ulysses is seemingly experiencing an attack of wanderlust, and as he goes on, becomes more and more passionate until he has slipped into the form of rhetoric, a persuasive argument using emotional appeal. If he leaves, his son will take his place; Ulysses describes him as perfect for the job, yet there is condescension in his description—his son is “most blameless…centered in the sphere/Of common duties, decent not to fail/In offices of tenderness…He works his work, I mine.”—in other words, not an adventurer, but more officious. Ulysses implies his “work” was better somehow than what his son could do as a good ruler—which raises questions of whether or not Ulysses himself was a good king. After all, he wanted adventure before, ended up being gone for years, during which—if you’ve read Homer’s “Odyssey,” you know--his friends all died, his family fell apart, and his kingdom nearly did as well. Now, after a short time home, he is ready to shirk his duties and responsibilities yet again. Unfortunately, Ulysses has the heart of a hero, and this makes him selfish; is he responsible, however, for his character? Fate has given him duties, but not the character to carry them out. Like anyone, Ulysses yearns to live the life that he is meant for, and that life has little room for the formalities of Kingship.

Ulysses says that even many lives would not be enough to sate his thirst for adventure, but every moment would be a moment taken away from his time in the afterlife—“Life piled on life/were all too little, and of one to me little remains, but every hour is saved/From that eternal silence…” In his eagerness for adventure, Ulysses is willing to forget the toll his first absence had on his family and kingdom. He is feeling his age, and wants one more adventure before death—“You and I are old; old age hath yet his honor and his toil;/Death closes all: but something ere the end, some work of noble note may yet be done.”

In the last stanza, Ulysses looks out to the sea. We find that it is twilight, that he sees the spirits of his fellow mariners. In speaking to them, Ulysses is inviting his death, and we realize that all the speech beforehand is leading to this point. He is bored, feeling useless, and knows that he is too old for real adventure. The sea issues out voices (the deep/Moans round with many voices) to which Ulysses responds invitingly—he calls his friends ghosts out of the water in which they died, and encourages them to “seek a newer world…to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all western stars…” These references are to places that are imaginatively limitless, mysterious; they offer the thrill of the unknown, and the promise of greatness, though from them no one has ever returned. Underneath this wish to sail is the knowledge that he alone has survived his adventures, and that he could not survive another. His plans for journeying become a journey of the soul, eagerness to let loose of his ennui and sadness and take on the adventure of the unknown. Ulysses is “one equal temper of heroic hearts” and though “made weak by time” has the will to not submit on Death’s terms, but to submit on his own—his body made weak by time, but his will is “not to yield”—he will find adventure even in dying, and even for that, be a hero still.

Dickens and Industrialism

In Dickens’ account of his visit to Newgate Prison, we are reading about the first encounter with the effects of urbanization—the extremely rapid changes in culture combined with the social Darwinism popular in his time. Many people believed at the time that to be poor was reflective of having no morals, not that poverty was the result of a mix of ideals and practices set forth by various Institutions, like law, the church, or education. If you look at whom Dickens sees in the prison, you come across men and women of all ages, but none of high social class (I don’t think there was such a thing as a middle class then, but I could be wrong). It was believed that since the poor were themselves to blame for their condition and criminality, then it was easier to “get rid” of them than rehabilitate, like the fourteen year old condemned for stealing bread; there was very little public aid available then; that which was was for widows and the disabled.

Newgate prison is built in a fairly respectable section of town, along the colleges and marketplace, but all those that pass by it are “utterly unmindful.” The overcrowding of cities has made people disregard that which does not immediately concern them. Instead of knowing your neighbors and helping each other, in the cities, everyone struggles just the same, and if someone else is in trouble, at least it is not you. Dickens’ description of the inside of the prison is that of a bleak fortress, where one is ushered through gate after gate; the sheer size of it alone must be overwhelming. Prisoners are crowded into rooms without any privacy. Both the men’s and women’s rooms were described as light and spacious; the women kept their pottery clean and were provided with texts of scripture; they also were given work to perform, which must have at least made the time go by faster, if not providing some source of self-worth. I was surprised to see no evidence of the men having any work to do. Maybe, because of society’s view on acceptable forms of work for men and women, there was nothing “worthy” for the men to do, despite their prisoner status. This lack of work for men must have surely contributed to their apathy.

When Dickens gets to the boy’s section, he is amazed that many of the boys line up as if they are pleased, or if they had “done something excessively meritorious in getting there at all.” He calls them “hopeless creatures of neglect.” There were uncountable numbers of orphans on the streets in those times, and orphanages were hardly more than workhouses. Again, we see how the overcrowding of cities without proper planning or aid to the poor results in more crime and more prisoners.

When he gets to the section where he describes the prison chapel and “death row,” we get a great idea of the dehumanization and psychological intimidation that inmates went through. The chapel itself is composed of “mean appointments—bare and scanty pulpit…” dingy benches, dusty and damp. Maybe this is the most depressing of all the rooms, because as we read from the testimonies of the two factory worker girls in our text, the people in the prison probably had little or no training in religion. The religion of the State, or of the Rich, had little comfort to give to the poor or condemned, as it was used as justification for not helping the poor. Why should they be interested? Considering that at one time the prison wardens would put those about to be executed in the front pews—specifically labeled for the condemned--next to their own coffins for one last sermon, what spiritual comfort could possibly be derived from such a stark, bleak atmosphere? We see examples of this disregard for religion in the condemned cells, where the Bible evidenced “no tokens of its having been in recent use.”

The combination of industrialization, overcrowding, and attitudes toward the poor—in lack of resources and opportunities—had dehumanized the majority of the population, and also those in power. As Dickens states, “they have entered at once upon the stern realities and miseries of life, and to their better nature it is almost hopeless to appeal.”
Being so many, the masses were a commodity and a hindrance to the upper classes, who viewed them as deserving of their condition.

In Shelley's "Ozymandias," Shelley gives us a poem that is also a departure from the traditional romantic themes we have come across so far. The ruined statue of Ozymandias, a great king of old, lies forgotten in the desert, covered by sand. Shelley was described in the intro as an anarchist and revolutionary, infamous for his intolerance of "kingcraft"; Ozymandias is his statement on what comes of man's pride.

Shelley tells us of meeting a stranger, who tells him about the statue. The first thing the traveller tells us about is the "trunkless legs of stone;" the torso has fallen and vanished beneath the shifting desert sands, maybe telling us that this Ozymandias lacked heart or "guts", or courage. The only clue to his personality is his "visage...whose frown,/and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command" tells us that this king was cruel and arrogant. Shelley tells us that the sculptor "mocked" those "passions" that he included in the king's image, telling us that people do not respect power or the poeple who hold it for power's sake alone. The king was mighty and powerful in his time, but now even his image lies wasted. That we get this image in a tale from someone who is hearing it from someone else further reduces the power that Ozymandias had.

Next we come to his epigraph, an obviously ironic statement: "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" His works lie in ruins, his name and kingdom forgotten and buried by sand, victims of true power--the power of time, to which humans are insignificant. Human power doesn't last, Shelley is telling us, as time will bury us all, cover us in "lone and level sands". Conversely though, this is not just a statement on those who wield power over others as a weapon, but on anyone, good or bad. If we are all subject to being forgotten, then our works do not matter regardless of what we do.

Keats is one of my favorite Romantic poets, and "La Belle Dame sans Merci" was one of my favorite poems. The first time I read it, in high school, I thought that it was just a "mood" poem about a Siren. It was in further reading that I began to see it on a deeper level, as a story about the danger in living in fantasy, and not accepting reality.

Keats opens with an unknown speaker addressing a knight, who is "loitering" around a hill. He says the knight looks "haggard and woe-begone," describing his physical and mental states. The speaker may or may not be soemone who is simply concerned for the knight. In his statements he offers the knight two choices based on his behavior and appearance: the first is death, symbolized by the "wither'd lake"; the second is life, seeing that "the squirrel's granary is full," or that there is the presence of normal, natural life. We also know that from the footnotes he perceives the knight's melancholy is due to lost love--lily symbol for death and rose for love or beauty. What we find from the knight, however, is that his love was not for a person, or at least a real one, but for the fantasy life that she allowed him to be a part of.

In the knight's telling of his tale, Keats mixes details that are normal to us, and some that are otherworldly, like the knight himself versus the lady, who speaks in "language strange," or the reference to manna which the lady prepared for him, a "miraculous dew" to create a sense of mystery. Keats use of word choice like "a fairy's child", her "elfin grot", reinforce the idea of something imaginary. Also, we can see where the lady, a symbol of fantasy or imagination, has taken control of the knight in the seventh stanza, where the knight switches from use of "I" to "She." In the fifth stanza, the knight has taken her onto his horse, and "nothing else saw all day long; for sideways would she lean...". She is blocking his view of the world, enticing him to accept her enthrallment, which he does.

When he falls asleep with her, he dreams of her previous victims, all "kings, and princes too,/pale warriors..." Keats seems to imply that men of power may live in a fantasy land too, being out of touch with reality, or how real people live. This vision proves terrifying to the knight, and forces him back to a waking state. It is upon waking, though, that the knight seems even more lost. He is not loitering, or merely hanging out, but "sojourn(ing)," implying a stay, again avoiding the real world, but not letting go of his fantasy world either. The trouble is one can not survive in a fantasy; nor can one ignore reality and live. At the end, the knight echoes the lines of the questioner, "That is why I sojourn here/Alone and palely loitering,/Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,/And no birds sing." In doing so, and in using the symbology of the withered lake, the knight is telling us that he has chosen death. He is dying from an inability to let go of his fantasy world, which though deadly to him, explains why he wouldn't leave the hillside after waking; conversely, not leaving the hillside will surely kill him as well because he can not live actively.

Byron, though sometimes difficult to read, has that mysterious something that makes a reader remember and think about what he has to say. His poetry is powerful, and imagery more so.
"She walks in beauty" seems so simple upon first reading, his admiring tone so formal, as such an object of beauty can not be addressed more personally. But we get from this poem a deeper understanding of the mechanics of beauty as seen through the Nature-appreciating attitude of the speaker. The subject of the poem represents divine beauty, surpassing even that beauty which "heaven to gaudy day denies," meaning that she is a balance (all that's best of dark and bright..."). Her beauty comes from her calmness, her "days in goodness spent." I just think it's a great love poem.

In "So, we'll go no more a-roving", we have a writing about sorrow, written when he turned 29. In it, Byron opens by saying that while the world outside has not changed, (the heart be still as loving,/And the moon be still as bright...) something inside the speaker has. In the second stanza, he makes the point that the "soul outwears the breast," like repeated in and out of a sword in the sheath will wear out the sheath, because the sword,like the soul, is made of harder stuff than that which holds it. The "heart must pause to breathe, and love itself have rest", or it will destroy the body and mind. He seems to be saying that he recognizes his aging, and must rest, or risk running himself down. He ends on a sadder note, that he is giving up on loving, ("though the night was made for loving...we'll go no more a-roving by the light of the moon."), perhaps lamenting his womanizing, but definitely lamenting his loss of youth.

If you thought he was depressed at turning 29, read what he wrote when turning 37. He recognizes his age, and his loss of youthful charm, stating "Tis time this heart should be moved/since others it hath ceased to move...My days are in the yellow leaf...The worm, the canker, and the grief/are mine alone!" He wishes that someone would return his affection, seeming almost desperate to be loved and not alone, which we see from the first quote and when he says, "the fire that on my bosom preys/is lone as some volcanic isle." His desire for love has become "a chain" which oppresses him. He changes tone, though, and seems to be giving himself a sad little pep talk, comparing himself and his love life to that of a soldier. He mentions that he was slave to his own passions in his youth, comparing it to the conscription of a soldier with no option of retreat--"The Spartan borne upon his shield,was not more free." He encourages this "soldier", his spirit, to "track down" and destroy his passion, to which he should remain indifferent. He asks why he should live if he regrets his youth, and in keeping with the metaphor of the honorable soldier, decides to choose his place to die willingly. In these last lines you see him becoming more passionate, but less for love and life, and more for ending the pain of loneliness.
There is a lesson here on what happens if you spend your life in affairs--one day you wake up and find that you are alone, and because of your reputation, you remain so.

Regarding Coleridge, I loved the Ancient Mariner; it has always been a favorite of mine. For this blog, however, I wanted to focus on another lesser known poem in the text. "Work without Hope," seems to me to be a great departure from most of the Romantic poems we have read so far. In it, the speaker is a depressed figure, who sees all around him the workings of a new Spring, bees, slugs, and birds leaving their lairs, but being that he is stuck in his depression, or in Winter, is unable to appreciate the beauty growing around him. He contrasts the busy-ness of Nature around him to his own unproductiveness: "And I, the sole unbusy thing, nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing." He is unable to glorify Nature because it reminds him of the stagnancy of his own life--"Bloom, O ye aramanths...for me ye bloom not." The text also mentions that aramanths are an unfading flower, so it seems Coleridge is focusing on his own fading nature, which again, takes him out of the traditional understanding of Nature, as he is disregarding his inner life, which is also unfading.
He is brooding over his attitude of hopelesness, "with lips unbrightened, wreathless brow I stroll." A wreath is usually a symbol of power, so he is lamenting his life as a failure; he addresses the streams in a melancholy query, "Would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?", as if he believes even Nature could not remain so hopeful if it were to experience whatever it is that makes him so hopeless. He ends by saying that just as it is impossible to "draw nectar in a seive," you can't work without hope because hope has to have some place to go or work out to survive.

In Dorothy's poem "Thoughts on My Sick-bed," we listen to her reminisce about her youth, spent joyfully roaming about. However, in thinking about those times, she seems to be wondering if she'd contributed enough to her friends, or to the world. She was eager to grow up and experience life--she mentions "welcoming...the Celandine" a symbol of aging, and "with busy eyes I pierced the lane/In quest of known and unkown things. She talks about being the "companions of nature", though I get the feeling she didn't fully appreciate that because she was so busy looking for experience. Looking back, though, she seems to have a deeper awareness of Nature, and her place in it. She mentions that her friends bring her fresh flowers from her home, and it stirs within her memories of her youth. Though ill, she is full of joy, because memory has given her "Power unfelt before, controlling weakness, langour, pain." That Nature has made her more consciuos, more aware of her place in the world, through memory, gives her strength to wander in the world (through spirit) and away from her ill body, no longer a "prisoner."
We can take a valuable lesson from her--to enjoy the time that we are in, and to appreciate the beauty that surrounds us. being conscious and aware of our place in the world gives us great peace and strength, even in the bad times.

I liked all of Wordsworth’s poems, but the Lucy poems stood out to me the most (besides Tintern Alley). In the first, “Strange fits of passion have I known,” he tells us of traveling to Lucy’s home, and creates an atmosphere of languorous daydreaming, backed by the clopping of his horses hooves. “Upon the moon I fix’d my eye,/all over the wide lea;/My horse trudg’d on…”, then mentions the paths, the orchard plot, the hill leading up to Lucy’s house. By focusing on the landmarks and mentioning his horse moving on, “hoof after hoof he rais’d and never stopp’d:” we are lulled into the same dream that the speaker mentions in the fifth stanza. We follow the moon with him, which is slowly descending, and by the time the speaker has reached Lucy’s cottage, the moon is hidden behind it, and he fancies that Lucy has died.
This poem is centered on creating a mood, using the slow progress of the speaker, and the onward trudging of his horse through lea, path, orchard, and hill. Wordsworth gives us the symbol of the moon, which represents Lucy, and its slow descent until hidden from view, being Lucy’s death. Lucy and the moon are one, and he has her in his thoughts through his whole journey.

In the second poem, “Song”, we get an idea of Lucy herself as a lonely woman, “A Maid whom there were none to praise/And very few to love.” She is to Wordsworth a symbol of delicate beauty, barely known (“A Violet by a mossy stone/Half hidden from the Eye). He laments her passing as making a grave difference to him.

In “Three years she grew in sun and shower”, Wordsworth’s love of Nature stands out. Nature has made Lucy a template of the perfect woman, and reclaimed her, through death, to be company to Herself. Lucy has become Spirit, is given new life by Nature, and is made more beautiful, more mysterious, than she could have been in physical life. She attains the “calm of mute insensate things,” grace by the “motions of the storm”, gains stature from good feelings. Wordsworth’s loneliness at the end of the poem--“she died, and left to me/this heath, this calm and quiet scene, the memory of what has been,/and never more will be,” --is tempered by his knowing that she is a part of all things, and that he can be near her anytime simply by going outside. This poem seems to be the one where he has accepted her death.


In “The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth separates the World from the Natural. The World is an entity which decreases Man’s appreciation of Nature. By “Getting and spending, we decrease our powers,” meaning that we dull ourselves, and that we deny God’s inheritance—being one with Nature. He personifies Sea and Wind, so we view them as beings, ones which we ignore and for which we “are out of tune.” this makes Wordsworth sad, and wishes he could see the real spirits of Nature, like Proteus and Triton, to comfort him and place him back in the realm of what he perceives as being most important-the spiritual.