The cruelest month: sail beyond the sunset

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.