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 60 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. 65 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 70 To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 66 9.99 - Mem Ulysses was written soon after Arthur Hallam's death, and gave my feeling about the need of going forward, and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything in 'In Memoriam.' oirs I. 196. The opening lines portray the restive spirit of the searover who had been doomed in the under-world by Tiresias to winnow constantly with an oar to lands and peoples knowing not Poseidon or the taste of bread mingled with salt, and, finally, after giving sacrifices to Poseidon, to find such a death as that given by the skatebone at the hands of his son Telegonus. (2) “ among these barren crags (Ithaca). τρηχεῖ ἀλλ' ἀγαθὴ κουροτρόφος. It is rugged but a kindly nurse of heroes.- Odyssey IX. 27. (6-7) “I will drink | Life to the lees." Cf. " Macbeth," Act II. 3: "and the mere lees | Is left this vault to brag of." Give an account of the wanderings of Ulysses wherein he greatly enjoyed and suffered. (10) Cf. Pluviasque Hyadas geminosque Triones. - Æn. I. 744. (11) “I am become a name." Cf. Byron's "Prophecy of Dante," Canto I.: "And pilgrims come from climes where they have known In (22-24), cf. "Merlin and Vivien," 470-478. Merlin while talking to Vivien said he once met a squire with wooden shield, on which was painted a golden eagle soaring in azure to the golden sun, and under was written "I follow fame." "And speaking not, but leaning over him, I took his brush and blotted out the bird, And made a gardener putting in a graff, With this for motto, Rather use than fame."" (43) Comment on "He works his work, I mine." (45) This line shows the fascination of his old life. (56) "The deep | Moans round with many voices." Cf. "Demeter and Persephone," "the waves that moan about the world," and "The Voyage," "The houseless ocean's heaving field." (57) ""Tis not too late to seek a newer world." Cf. Longfellow's "Morituri Salutamus": and: "Ah, nothing is too late Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate. "What then? Shall we sit idly down and say Than youth itself, though in another dress, The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day." (59-61) Cf. "The Last Tournament," 581-583: "O sweeter than all memories of thee, Deeper than any yearnings after thee 99 Seem'd those far-rolling, westward smiling seas." (62-64) "These lines do not make me weep, but there is in me what would fill whole Lachrymatories as I read."— Thomas Carlyle. As we read It may be that the gulfs will wash us down," these lines in "Demeter and Persephone" come to mind: "And souls of men who grew beyond their race And made themselves as Gods against the fear According to Dante's "Inferno," Canto 26, they pushed beyond the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic past the "land's last limit," and while anxiously peering at the verge of the horizon for Elysian fields, a league-long roller with inaudible tread washed them into the gulfs. Thus occurred the passing of Ulysses. As in a former poem, how has the romantic been applied to the classical? "Ulysses " is a fine ethical antidote to "The Lotos-Eaters." BREAK, BREAK, BREAK Break, break, break On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! 5 O well for the fisherman's boy, ΙΟ That he shouts with his sister at play! O well for the sailor lad, That he sings in his boat on the bay! And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand, Break, break, break, At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! 15 But the tender grace of a day that is dead When and where was this poem written? "Half a mile to the south of Clevedon in Somersetshire, on a lonely hill, stands Clevedon Church, 'obscure and solitary,' overlooking a wide expanse of water; where the Severn flows into the Bristol Channel. It is dedicated to St. Andrew, the chancel being the original fishermen's chapel. "From the graveyard you can hear the music of the tide as it washes against the low cliffs not a hundred yards away. In the manor aisle of the church, under which is the vault of the Hallams, may be read this epitaph to Arthur Hallam, written by his father. . ."- Memoirs I.295-6. The burial of Arthur took place on January 3rd, 1834. "On the evening of one of these sad winter days, my father had already noted down in his scrap-book some fragmentary lines, which proved to be the germ of 'In Memoriam.' Where is the voice I loved? Ah where Is that dear hand that I would press? - Memoirs I. 107. Tennyson had not visited Hallam's grave before writing this poem. THE DAYS THAT ARE NO MORE Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean; Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, That sinks with all we love below the verge; 10 So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more. Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds To dying ears, when unto dying eyes The casement slowly grows a glimmering square; 15 So sad, so strange, the days that are no more. 'Dear as remember'd kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret ; 20 O Death in Life, the days that are no more.' He told me that he was moved to write "Tears, idle tears" at Tintern Abbey ; and that it was not real woe, as some people might suppose, "it was rather the yearning that young people occasionally experience for that which seems to have passed away from them forever.” That in him it was strongest when he was quite a youth. He said, "Old Carlyle, who is never moved by poetry, once quoted those lines of mine, while we were out walking." Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson, Memoirs II. 73. "It is a perfect piece of art with a certain sentimental and feminine quality, which we do not find in the virile and rugged Browning.”Johnson, Elements of Literary Criticism, p. 220. Is this canon of criticism applicable to the poem: "A poem which is all sweetness is detestable, and a composition of any kind which consists of fine phrases with no intellectual coherence is hardly less so"? See Johnson, Elements of Literary Criticism, p. 221. In this poem, as in Wordsworth's line "Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns," you are conscious of the pathetic abiding of the transient. What phrases in Wordsworth's "Ode On Immortality" are at once remembered on reading the first four lines? In the second stanza we are reminded of what "passings " in Tennyson's poetry? This lyric is cast in what form of verse? TO VIRGIL I Roman Virgil, thou that singest Ilion's lofty temples robed in fire, Ilion falling, Rome arising, wars, and filial faith, and Dido's pyre; |