I’ll confess that I struggle with today’s offering
for National
Poetry Month. Or, at least—my relationship with it has changed over the
years I’ve known it.
The poem is Tennyson’s “Ulysses”, but he’s not
talking about the youthful or middle-aged hero, the Sacker of Cities or the guy
who kept Circe happy for months on end. This is the old Ulysses, the guy with
arthritis and probably insomnia. This King of Ithaca is pretty much looking at his life in the rear-view mirror and it’s giving him the pip.
Ulysses
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an agèd 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 enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed 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 honoured 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 wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though 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 grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This 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 through 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 toiled, 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,
'Tis 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
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
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.
Here’s my, uh, well—okay, not a problem, really. But
a changing viewpoint, I guess.
Back in high school, when I first read it, the poem
really struck me quite deeply. Why, I even titled my college thesis (on the
contribution of women to World War I) “Work of Noble Note”. So many “captain-of-my-fate”
elements to it, yeah?
I thought Ulysses was brave and valiant. You know—he’s
thinking about getting the band back together and taking it on the road, even
if it’s the last tour. He’s going to model his final time units on the template
he established in his early years.
But that’s because he had that brilliant career back
in the day.
I’m suddenly reminded of a comment someone—a woman,
to be sure—made about a photograph of Sophia Loren taken when she was maybe 60.
The observation was along the lines of, “You see—a woman can be quite
attractive at 60 if she was stunningly gorgeous in her youth.”
And there you are. When I was in high school, I
thought there was a life ahead that involved righting wrongs, going on
adventures and mad moments of exquisite happiness. (Only, when you’re a
teenager, you really don’t expect exquisite happiness to be meted out in
moments; you reckon on years.) And now that I have this apparently permanent relationship with ibuprofen, and sleep is a hard-won thing, I wonder what adventures I could
possibly find in the future, when they’re so thin on the ground of the past?
Well, what the hell. I’ve dredged this one up from
my past. Must be a reason for that.
Besides self-torment, I mean.
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