The Art of Manliness - Manvotionals - Brett McKay [47]
Early in our training, it could have been Sink, or Sobel, or Winters, somebody said, “Determination is the answer.” I took that to heart. At Bastogne we were cold. We were hungry. But we had to get the job done. A job ought to be done right if you’re going to do it at all.
Ulysses
FROM POEMS, 1842
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Odyssey, written by the Greek poet Homer, follows the hero Odysseus (Ulysses in Roman myths) as he journeys home after fighting in the Trojan War. After ten years of fighting, Odysseus was determined to return to his family as quickly as possible. But he is thwarted in his quest by obstacles and monsters, and it takes him another decade of traveling to make it back to Ithaca. During that time Odysseus never wavers in his resolve to embrace his family once more.
In “Ulysses,” Tennyson imagines life for Odysseus after the euphoria of his homecoming has waned and life in Ithaca has returned to normal. Odysseus is advanced in years and free from his former hardships, and yet is restless for further challenge and travel on the open seas; he resolves to die living a life of adventure and prepares to set sail once again. Tennyson wrote this poem after learning of the death of his close friend and fellow poet, Arthur Henry Hallam. Devastated by the loss of this companion, Tennyson said the poem “gave my feeling about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life,” that despite such loss, “still life must be fought out to the end.”
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched 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
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,
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 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,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Where 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.
This is my son, my 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 thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centered 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 toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and