Ulysses

Description

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses” recasts Homer’s ageing hero as a restless king who finds ordinary domestic life intolerably stagnant and longs once again for adventure, knowledge, and struggle. Written after the death of Tennyson’s close friend Arthur Hallam, the poem is both a declaration of defiance against mortality and a meditation on the impulse to keep striving even when life’s great adventures appear to be behind you.