Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d I would have raged against those who pursue their own private agendas and petty goals – those who “hoard, and sleep, and feed” instead of reaching for higher goals and the greater good. I often wonder would I be equally dissatisfied had I been returned to council this term, among the “savage race” at the table? Certainly I would have been frustrated and angered as Ulysses by the wooden and uncomprehending heads that populate it now. Their attention is focused on the ground while he scans the sky. He has lost his connection to the people he rules, and they seem savage to him. Power and position have no chains to bind him to the mundane everyday tasks of governance any more. Ulysses was returned to the role of king and despite its trappings, is dissatisfied with it. Do we drift into retirement after a lifetime of school and work, to paddle downstream, drift with the current towards death? Or do we itch for more adventure? Are we satisfied with who we ae or do we want to be something else? Someone we once were?

Everything he left behind has changed – himself most of all – and he wants to be the man he was when facing adversity, years before.īut equally it is about us, all of us, as we age. His wife, years older, is no longer the beauty he left behind when he headed to Troy. His home has lost its former glory and seems barren to him. After ears away, he feels constrained, is restless, and itches to go back out on the road. The poem is ostensibly about Ulysses, the voyager returned from his adventures and his battle in Troy. That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole The poem, a monologue, opens:īy this still hearth, among these barren crags, With both my parents dead, my own age presses upon me in ways it never did before.īut back to Tennyson. What age does to us, what it presents, how we manage it. Not in a maudlin way, but rather as in seeing doors open and new paths to explore, making the most of what I have.

Age, especially, seems to shine a new, different light on words and meanings.Īge is one of the things I think about more these days. Or the third, fourth or tenth… Well, perhaps not funny as in humourus. It’s funny how one can read into a poem something entirely different on another reading. I can’t recall exactly when I first read it, but it was in high school, in the 1960s. The poem was written by Tennyson in 1833, but not published until 1842. I recognized it immediately and it made me open the poem and read it again. Last weekend, while watching the delightful movie, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, I heard Bill Nighy make a wedding speech that included lines from one of my favourite poems: Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Ulysses by tennyson