By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The line ‘to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’, with its quartet of infinitives, is one of Tennyson’s most memorable quotations. The line concludes one of his finest dramatic monologues (a literary mode Tennyson, along with his fellow Victorian poet Robert Browning, did much to invent and develop), ‘Ulysses’.
Origins
Ulysses is, of course, the Latin name for Odysseus: that Greek wanderer who famously took a whole decade to return home from the Trojan War. His devoted wife Penelope waited patiently for him at home on the island of Ithaca.
In Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses/Odysseus has returned home and growing old with his family and friends for some years. And he’s grown restless. He misses the adventure and excitement of donning his armour, climbing in his boat, and voyaging off somewhere. The rousing final words of the monologue see Ulysses rallying his men to action:
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
And what are they? They are comrades, they are fighters and adventurers, and they all (Ulysses assumes) miss the excitement of sailing the seas and fighting battles as much as he does:
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.
Rooted in Tragedy
Tennyson once remarked that ‘Ulysses’ was ‘written under the sense of loss and that all had gone by, but that still life must be fought out to the end.’ In particular, the ‘sense of loss’ Tennyson was coping with was the death of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who had suddenly died, aged just 22, in 1833.
We need to bear in mind Tennyson’s own comments about the poem because these add a personal poignancy to the closing line, ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’.
A commentary on ‘Ulysses’ that neglects to address the role that Hallam’s death had in inspiring this poem about courage and fighting on, and fighting even when one personally sees no point in such things because all that mattered has been lost, is likely to miss the real message of ‘Ulysses’. And that message? That although we may personally be ‘made weak by time and fate’ we must remain ‘strong in will’ and keep going.
Note the development of verbs in the line: to strive leads us to get up and go out into the world to seek what we need, and by seeking we will find that thing. But this trio of positive infinitives is then complemented by a single, negative infinitive: ‘not to yield’, never to give up, never to throw in the towel and give up the fight and the search.
Yielding to what? Death, one presumes, in light of Hallam’s early death and the long shadow this tragedy cast over Tennyson.
Resounding … or Ringing Hollow?
But how convincing we find Ulysses’ act of courage here can be questioned. A cynic might accuse Ulysses of talking big words which he is unable to live up to: he is, after all, an older man when he decides to sail off beyond the sunset (that sunset itself a piece of nifty symbolism, reflecting our hero’s own advanced years).
So there’s a different tragedy here: the tragedy of the once-great warrior and strategist who is unable to accept that his fighting days are behind him and it’s time to grow old gracefully in retirement, surrounded by his loving family.
Mind you, he seems to mean more to his family than they do to him. He doesn’t feel at home on Ithaca, describing himself as an ‘idle king’ surrounded by ‘barren crags’, with ‘an aged wife’ next to him, ruling over a people who don’t even know him – well, if you will sod off to explore the Mediterranean when you should be ruling your island …
As one Victorian commentator, Goldwin Smith, put it in 1855, Ulysses wants to take to the seas again ‘merely to relieve his ennui’ and that ‘he roams aimlessly’ since ‘he intends to roam, but stands for ever a listless and melancholy figure on the shore.’ Perhaps he is all talk and after he’s finished his rousing speech, he will realise his cannot continue to strive, to seek, and to find – and he must, at last, learn to yield to the march of time and the ravages of age.