No More Learning

Altered to "Yet oceans daily gaining on the land". ]

[Footnote 4: 'Selections', 1865. Plunge. ]







ULYSSES

First published in 1842, no alterations were made in it subsequently.

This noble poem, which is said to have induced Sir Robert Peel to give
Tennyson his pension, was written soon after Arthur Hallam's death,
presumably therefore in 1833. "It gave my feeling," Tennyson said to his
son, "about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life
perhaps more simply than anything in 'In Memoriam'. " It is not the
'Ulysses' of Homer, nor was it suggested by the 'Odyssey'. The germ, the
spirit and the sentiment of the poem are from the twenty-sixth canto of
Dante's 'Inferno', where Ulysses in the Limbo of the Deceivers speaks
from the flame which swathes him. I give a literal version of the
passage:--

"Neither fondness for my son nor reverence for my aged sire nor the
due love which ought to have gladdened Penelope could conquer in me
the ardour which I had to become experienced in the world and in human
vice and worth. I put out into the deep open sea with but one ship and
with that small company which had not deserted me. . . . I and my
companions were old and tardy when we came to that narrow pass where
Hercules assigned his landmarks. 'O brothers,' I said, 'who through a
hundred thousand dangers have reached the West deny not to this the
brief vigil of your senses that remain, experience of the unpeopled
world beyond the sun.
Consider your origin, ye were not formed to live
like Brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge. . . . Night already saw
the other pole with all its stars and ours so low that it rose not
from the ocean floor'"

('Inferno', xxvi. , 94-126).

But if the germ is here the expansion is Tennyson's; he has added
elaboration and symmetry, fine touches, magical images and magical
diction. There is nothing in Dante which answers to--

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

or

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.

Of these lines well does Carlyle say what so many will feel: "These
lines do not make me weep, but there is in me what would till whole
Lacrymatorics as I read".


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 [1]
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, [2]
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 for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end, [3]
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.