Capping off this week of poetry we take a look at Alfred Lord Tennyson’s classic “Ulysses” a paean to adventure and globe-trotting everywhere. But Tennyson might have intended a deep irony in this dramatic monologue from one of Western civilization’s greatest heroes…

It little profits that 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,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea: 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 honour'd 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 wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

As tho' 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.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

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.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Today, we’re taking a look at Allen Tate’s Aeneid-inspired “Mediterranean.” Although the poem explores similiar ground to Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” its approach is nostalgic and ironic. Where are the great heroes and great adventures of old? Are they still possible today?

Quem das finem, rex magne, dolorum?

Where we went in the boat was a long baya slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone--Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,And we went there out of time's monotone:Where we went in the black hull no light movedBut a gull white-winged along the feckless wave,The breeze, unseen but fierce as a body loved,That boat drove onward like a willing slave:Where we went in the small ship the seaweedParted and gave to us the murmuring shoreAnd we made feast and in our secret needDevoured the very plates Aeneas bore:Where derelict you see through the low twilightThe green coast that you, thunder-tossed, would win,Drop sail, and hastening to drink all nightEat dish and bowl--to take that sweet land in!Where we feasted and caroused on the sandlessPebbles, affecting our day of piracy,What prophecy of eaten plates could landlessWanderers fulfil by the ancient sea?We for that time might taste the famous ageEternal here yet hidden from our eyesWhen lust of power undid its stuffless rage;They, in a wineskin, bore earth's paradise.Let us lie down once more by the breathing sideOf Ocean, where our live forefathers sleepAs if the Known Sea still were a month wide--Atlantis howls but is no longer steep!What country shall we conquer, what fair landUnman our conquest and locate our blood?We've cracked the hemispheres with careless hand!Now, from the Gates of Hercules we floodWestward, westward till the barbarous brineWhelms us to the tired land where tasseling corn,Fat beans, grapes sweeter than muscadineRot on the vine: in that land were we born.

Today, we will consider Romantic poet John Clare’s “I am,” written in 1844, when the poet had already spent considerable time in an insane asylum. What ostensibly appears a typical declaration of identity is actually a much more complex self-study into the nature of self: in his illness, Clare struggled to remember just who he was, and would even confuse his identity with the likes of Byron and Shakespeare.

I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?

My friends forsake me like a memory lost.

I am the self-consumer of my woes,

They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,

Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost.

And yet I am—I live—though I am toss'd

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dream,

Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys,

But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem

And all that's dear. Even those I loved the best

Are strange—nay, they are stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod,

For scenes where woman never smiled or wept;

There to abide with my Creator, God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept

Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,

The grass below; above the vaulted sky.