Discuss the Use of Myth and Legend in Tennyson’s Poem.

Being a Poet Laureate it was Tennyson’s moral responsibility to lead the nation to right directions. For this he selected a proper myth from ancient Greece for a poem that suggested a moral teaching. He used the Ulysses myth of Odysseus to inspire a desire for exploration among the Victorian people.

Tennyson used the Ulysses myth on several occasions to express his own attitudes towards life. In the poems ‘The Lotos Eaters’ and ‘Ulysses’ are found symbolic treatments of separation, either from an object of love (Ulysses) or from the natural course of life (The Lotos Eaters). The ‘traveling’ figure of Ulysses gets away to an unknown land of fruit and flowers in ‘The Lotos Eaters’. This is a clear expression of a characteristic of Tennyson- a certain life-weariness, a longing for rest and oblivion. His profusion of scenic description makes a strong contrast to the quiet line and feeling of the Homeric narrative. Homer’s heroes escaped from the land of fruit and flowers by the strong action of Odysseus, a man who did not doubt his responsibility.

If Tennyson had not written ‘The Lotos Eaters’ before Hallam’s death, he probably could not have chosen the Ulysses myth to write the poem ‘Ulysses’. It was Hallam’s death that drew his attention to the selfishness of the main ideas of the former poem. He wrote ‘Ulysses’ as a counter statement of ‘The Lotos Eaters’. Ulysses has insatiable thirst for knowledge. He wants to set sail to acquire new knowledge. But the poem is about the escape from the responsibilities of ‘Ithaca’. While Homer’s hero found the estrangement caused by his long absence undesirable and intolerable, Tennyson’s Ulysses is too intent upon the discovery of the new and unknown to have any feelings of regret.

According to Tennyson, a person can become a greater spirit through voyages of experience. Everyone is capable of being a Ulysses who strives to keep sailing till he smoothly crosses into the realm of the spirit, ‘the far-off divine event’; the ship and voyage are necessary, seeing life is ‘material-oriented’, though at times it becomes barely tolerable. The material things of home, family and friends must not stop a Ulysses. The transcendental values are on the other side of loss, defeat and death.

These poems have the themes of lassitude, restlessness, roaming, spirit, ennui of old age and the philosophical ordour or serenity and they could each have been framed in the myth of the always roaming, the hungry heated, the discontented Ulysses.