The title is an allusion to the first line of Vergil's Aeneid.

In English, the line translates as "I sing

of arms and the man." In Vergil, "the man" is, of course, Aeneas, and "arms" refers to the Trojan
War & Aeneas' journey from Greece.

Because Shaw's play is a satire, the title should be looked at ironically. Rather than praising
"arms" & the men who use them, Shaw is dissecting the reality of war, showing the futile nature
of taking up arms. The characters in Shaw's play, especially Major Sergius Saranoff, serve to
underscore the traditional heroism in war of the epic. Saranoff becomes a caricature, desperately
clinging to his romanticized ideal of a hero. He struggles to be defined as one himself, but Shaw
uses the character to instead suggest that no man could compare to a mythological hero in reality.

Summary

Ulysses (Odysseus) declares that there is little point in his staying home “by this still hearth” with
his old wife, doling out rewards and punishments for the unnamed masses who live in his
kingdom. Still speaking to himself he proclaims that he “cannot rest from travel” but feels
compelled to live to the fullest and swallow every last drop of life. He has enjoyed all his
experiences as a sailor who travels the seas, and he considers himself a symbol for everyone who
wanders and roams the earth. His travels have exposed him to many different types of people and
ways of living. They have also exposed him to the “delight of battle” while fighting the Trojan
War with his men. Ulysses declares that his travels and encounters have shaped who he is: “I am
a part of all that I have met,” he asserts. And it is only when he is traveling that the “margin” of
the globe that he has not yet traversed shrink and fade, and cease to goad him.

Ulysses declares that it is boring to stay in one place, and that to remain stationary is to rust rather
than to shine; to stay in one place is to pretend that all there is to life is the simple act of
breathing, whereas he knows that in fact life contains much novelty, and he longs to encounter
this. His spirit yearns constantly for new experiences that will broaden his horizons; he wishes “to
follow knowledge like a sinking star” and forever grow in wisdom and in learning.

Ulysses now speaks to an unidentified audience concerning his son Telemachus, who will act as
his successor while the great hero resumes his travels: he says, “This is my son, mine own
Telemachus, to whom I leave the scepter and the isle.” He speaks highly but also patronizingly of
his son’s capabilities as a ruler, praising his prudence, dedication, and devotion to the gods.
Telemachus will do his work of governing the island while Ulysses will do his work of traveling
the seas: “He works his work, I mine.”

In the final stanza, Ulysses addresses the mariners with whom he has worked, traveled, and
weathered life’s storms over many years. He declares that although he and they are old, they still
have the potential to do something noble and honorable before “the long day wanes.” He
encourages them to make use of their old age because “ ’tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
He declares that his goal is to sail onward “beyond the sunset” until his death. Perhaps, he
suggests, they may even reach the “Happy Isles,” or the paradise of perpetual summer described
in Greek mythology where great heroes like the warrior Achilles were believed to have been
taken after their deaths. Although Ulysses and his mariners are not as strong as they were in
youth, they are “strong in will” and are sustained by their resolve to push onward relentlessly:
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Form

This poem is written as a dramatic monologue: the entire poem is spoken by a single character,
whose identity is revealed by his own words. The lines are in blank verse, or unrhymed iambic
pentameter, which serves to impart a fluid and natural quality to Ulysses’s speech. Many of the
lines are enjambed, which means that a thought does not end with the line-break; the sentences
often end in the middle, rather than the end, of the lines. The use of enjambment is appropriate in
a poem about pushing forward “beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” Finally, the poem is
divided into four paragraph-like sections, each of which comprises a distinct thematic unit of the
poem.
Commentary

In this poem, written in 1833 and revised for publication in 1842, Tennyson reworks the figure of
Ulysses by drawing on the ancient hero of Homer’s Odyssey (“Ulysses” is the Roman form of the
Greek “Odysseus”) and the medieval hero of Dante’s Inferno. Homer’s Ulysses, as described in
Scroll XI of the Odyssey, learns from a prophecy that he will take a final sea voyage after killing
the suitors of his wife Penelope. The details of this sea voyage are described by Dante in Canto
XXVI of the Inferno: Ulysses finds himself restless in Ithaca and driven by “the longing I had to
gain experience of the world.” Dante’s Ulysses is a tragic figure who dies while sailing too far in
an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Tennyson combines these two accounts by having Ulysses
make his speech shortly after returning to Ithaca and resuming his administrative responsibilities,
and shortly before embarking on his final voyage.

However, this poem also concerns the poet’s own personal journey, for it was composed in the
first few weeks after Tennyson learned of the death of his dear college friend Arthur Henry
Hallam in 1833. Like In Memoriam, then, this poem is also an elegy for a deeply cherished
friend. Ulysses, who symbolizes the grieving poet, proclaims his resolution to push onward in
spite of the awareness that “death closes all” (line 51). As Tennyson himself stated, the poem
expresses his own “need of going forward and braving the struggle of life” after the loss of his
beloved Hallam.

The poem’s final line, “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” came to serve as a motto for
the poet’s Victorian contemporaries: the poem’s hero longs to flee the tedium of daily life “among
these barren crags” (line 2) and to enter a mythical dimension “beyond the sunset, and the baths
of all the western stars” (lines 60-61); as such, he was a model of individual self-assertion and the
Romantic rebellion against bourgeois conformity. Thus for Tennyson’s immediate audience, the
figure of Ulysses held not only mythological meaning, but stood as an important contemporary
cultural icon as well.

“Ulysses,” like many of Tennyson’s other poems, deals with the desire to reach beyond the limits
of one’s field of vision and the mundane details of everyday life. Ulysses is the antithesis of the
mariners in “The Lotos-Eaters,” who proclaim “we will no longer roam” and desire only to relax
amidst the Lotos fields. In contrast, Ulysses “cannot rest from travel” and longs to roam the globe
(line 6). Like the Lady of Shallot, who longs for the worldly experiences she has been denied,
Ulysses hungers to explore the untraveled world.

As in all dramatic monologues, here the character of the speaker emerges almost unintentionally
from his own words. Ulysses’ incompetence as a ruler is evidenced by his preference for potential
quests rather than his present responsibilities. He devotes a full 26 lines to his own egotistical
proclamation of his zeal for the wandering life, and another 26 lines to the exhortation of his
mariners to roam the seas with him. However, he offers only 11 lines of lukewarm praise to his
son concerning the governance of the kingdom in his absence, and a mere two words about his
“aged wife” Penelope. Thus, the speaker’s own words betray his abdication of responsibility and
his specificity of purpose.
Of all Tennyson's early poems, "Ulysses" seems to come closest to breaking this ironic tension,
Though there is more to the poem than the "need of going forward" (Memoir, I: 196) Tennyson
offered as his motive in writing it, the central power to which we respond is that of romantic
heroism. There are complex modulations in tone, certainly, but for most readers the poem moves
toward an expression of serene confidence:

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 (ll. 65-67]

But Ulysses is much more than another indomitable superman, beyond the reach of time and
death. He, in fact, grants the power of circumstance, even of age and physical weakness. He does
not stand above these forces but is caught by them, and he knows it. [41/42]

Yet he refuses to see himself as a victim and thus provides an answer to irony: the undefeated
will; see Charles Mitchell, for a reading that emphasizes this point. The will accepts its own
condition unflinchingly — "that which we are, we are" — but does not allow the force of external
terror to negate it. In the face of death, the comic will asserts an irreducible ego; the acceptance of
reality amounts to a triumph over it. The great modern hero is this old man, who has already had
his heroic adventures and who now achieves his personality and defines the hope of ours simply
by refusing not to be. The comic and heroic will is the poem's subject; its primary motive is the
relaxation of ironic tension.

But the tension is relaxed only within, not outside, the poem; for Ulysses, but not for us. The view
of heroism is made comprehensive as well as intense, and it is this completeness that causes the
escape to be closed to us. The force of the will projected here is enormous, but it is also, we
sense, highly specialized. The poem lacks entirely comedy's usual sense of inclusiveness.
"Ulysses" deals just as powerfully and rigorously with what the hero cannot accept as with what
he can; nearly half the poem is devoted to sloughing off the encumbrances that stand in the way
of this narrow solution. Because the poem is so explicit about this pruning, we can see the
magnitude and variety of the human spirit being sacrificed for its heroic but naked endurance.
The result is the only heroism and the only solution to irony now possible, both compelling and
impossibly restrictive. Despite the resounding, positive conclusion, the poem has worked to deny
us the ability to participate in it uncritically. Though apparently an alternative to "The Lotos-
Eaters," then, "Ulysses" operates in much the same way; it presents an answer that dissolves
tension for the speaker and increases it for the reader.

The two poems also seem to have similar strategies for attacking the ironic dualism by
heightening one-half of it: they both magnify the isolated, individual ego. Though the means of
satisfying the ego are very different, perhaps even opposite, in the two poems, both solutions are
equally exclusive and equally extreme. Some commentators, in fact, argue that these extremes
meet, that Ulysses's desire for life is rooted in a desire for death," This reading, perhaps, [42/43]
sacrifices too many important distinctions for this striking similarity, but it is true that both poems
are very uneasy with social demands, especially the sense of social acceptance that is central to
comedy. In place of this society they are forced to offer substitutes: the extraordinary fellowship
of death in "The Lotos-Eaters" or, in "Ulysses," what appears to be some highly dexterous faking.

For "Ulysses" seems to insist absolutely on the final separation of the individual from communal
values: the only hope for the existence of the self is in isolation. The rejection of community
begins at once:
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. [ll. 1 - 5]

The values associated with unity, order, and harmony, with love, family, and nation, are treated
with lofty and imposing contempt. "Little profits" catches exactly the sneer of aristocratic
understatement that is so disarming and so insusceptible of argument or reproof. What strikes us
here is the control and the breathtaking rapidity with which all these civilized values are swept
aside by the rush of the demands of the primitive self. The correctives we might apply are based
on moral and social values that have been made irrelevant.

Ulysess proceeds in the next lines with an expansive, positive tone that provides us with a kind of
rhetorical breather. His affirmations of a life-hunger act as a form of flattery, emphasizing the
indiscriminate richness and value of simple experience. But the real work of this second section
(ll. 6-32) is to reinforce the independent power and value of the ego: "I have enjoyed / Greatly,
have suffered greatly, both with those / That loved me, and alone" (ll. 7-9). Love and all other
mere externals are flattened and reduced to insignificance. The affirmations are all on the surface;
[43/44] underneath, the paring away continues as we approach nearer to the pure, undisguised
self.

When he turns to Telemachus, there is little disguise left. The naked scorn of the opening lines
has simply changed to a more confident, if bored, patronizing. Ulysses "accepts" Telemachus and
his duties, certainly, but he accepts them as inferior, hardly deserving of his attention. This sense
of casual superiority is carried largely by his diction, which is weary, cliché-filled, "official"
language. The tinge of parody is most apparent in his compliments: Telemachus is "most
blameless" (l. 39) — that is, most mediocre. Ulysses's evident relief at having dismissed this
tiresome subject — "He works his work, I mine" (l. 43) — emphasizes the enormous elevation he
has attained. The key is "I mine." Ulysses has by now accomplished his own goal: the rigorous
and careful definition of the heroic self.

The final section completes the pattern, presumably, by incorporating the triumphant ego of
Ulysses into the fellowship of his mariners. From another point of view, he must now turn to the
reader and include him in his plans. It is all rhetoric, both in the best and worst senses: it is
eloquent persuasion and also mere cajolery. In these lines we hear must clearly the echo of
Dante's sinner, who, after a stirring call to his comrades — "Ye were not form'd to live the life of
brutes,/ But virtue to pursue and knowledge high" — turns and with a different voice entirely
proudly announces the issue of his persuasive powers:

With these few words I sharpen'd for the voyage

The mind of my associates, that I then
Could scarcely have withheld them

[See Ricks, p. 561. The most interesting examination of the influences on the poem is by B. J.
Leggett. Leggett views the influence of Byron as extremely important and notes briefly a parallel
that supports the reading of the poem advanced here: "It is evident that in both the Byronic Hero
and Ulysses the identification of the self with the external world is qualified by the exclusion of
the remainder of mankind" (p. 153).]

There is more than a touch of this self-assured rhetorician in Tennyson's figure. Master of all
experience and, by this point in the poem, master of his own situation, Ulysses proceeds to
overpower his men — and he nearly overpowers us. But we sense the great [44/45] control and
assurance in his language, the uniform public rhythms so very different from the jagged, varied
movement earlier. Lines like, "It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, / And see the great
Achilles, whom we knew" (ll. 63-64), are striking partly for their quality of heroic
understatement, but also for the self-consciousness of this understatement. We apprehend the
exhilaration of the lonely and triumphant ego behind all this, and the very magnificence of the
language alerts, our critical sense and heightens the tension between sympathy and judgment.

Ulysses finally offers not comic union but absorption into his own ego. Everything in the poem
has demonstrated how resistant he is to being reduced to "one equal temper of heroic hearts" (l.
68). The heroic will can triumph only by cutting itself off from the very values it now seeks to
affirm. He has defined himself by casting away all communal, ego-reducing ties, and he thus
leaves us with no real solution. The final lines sadly reinforce both the greatness and the
inaccessibility of the hero. With a finer irony even than the lotos-eaters' appeal to their "brother
mariners" to join them in oblivion and death, Tennyson shows the existential hero able to create
by his supreme will a unity he cannot join simply because his will is supreme. Ulysses leaves
irony behind, but he pays a great price for his escape. And he makes it impossible for us to go
with him.

Summary

This poem is loosely based on historical events involving Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, who lived
in the 16th century. The Duke is the speaker of the poem, and tells us he is entertaining an
emissary who has come to negotiate the Duke’s marriage (he has recently been widowed) to the
daughter of another powerful family. As he shows the visitor through his palace, he stops before a
portrait of the late Duchess, apparently a young and lovely girl. The Duke begins reminiscing
about the portrait sessions, then about the Duchess herself. His musings give way to a diatribe on
her disgraceful behavior: he claims she flirted with everyone and did not appreciate his “gift of a
nine-hundred-years- old name.” As his monologue continues, the reader realizes with ever-more
chilling certainty that the Duke in fact caused the Duchess’s early demise: when her behavior
escalated, “[he] gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.” Having made this
disclosure, the Duke returns to the business at hand: arranging for another marriage, with another
young girl. As the Duke and the emissary walk leave the painting behind, the Duke points out
other notable artworks in his collection.
Form
“My Last Duchess” comprises rhyming pentameter lines. The lines do not employ end-stops;
rather, they use enjambment—gthat is, sentences and other grammatical units do not necessarily
conclude at the end of lines. Consequently, the rhymes do not create a sense of closure when they
come, but rather remain a subtle driving force behind the Duke’s compulsive revelations. The
Duke is quite a performer: he mimics others’ voices, creates hypothetical situations, and uses the
force of his personality to make horrifying information seem merely colorful. Indeed, the poem
provides a classic example of a dramatic monologue: the speaker is clearly distinct from the poet;
an audience is suggested but never appears in the poem; and the revelation of the Duke’s
character is the poem’s primary aim.
Commentary

But Browning has more in mind than simply creating a colorful character and placing him in a
picturesque historical scene. Rather, the specific historical setting of the poem harbors much
significance: the Italian Renaissance held a particular fascination for Browning and his
contemporaries, for it represented the flowering of the aesthetic and the human alongside, or in
some cases in the place of, the religious and the moral. Thus the temporal setting allows
Browning to again explore sex, violence, and aesthetics as all entangled, complicating and
confusing each other: the lushness of the language belies the fact that the Duchess was punished
for her natural sexuality. The Duke’s ravings suggest that most of the supposed transgressions
took place only in his mind. Like some of Browning’s fellow Victorians, the Duke sees sin
lurking in every corner. The reason the speaker here gives for killing the Duchess ostensibly
differs from that given by the speaker of “Porphyria’s Lover” for murder Porphyria; however,
both women are nevertheless victims of a male desire to inscribe and fix female sexuality. The
desperate need to do this mirrors the efforts of Victorian society to mold the behavior—gsexual
and otherwise—gof individuals. For people confronted with an increasingly complex and
anonymous modern world, this impulse comes naturally: to control would seem to be to conserve
and stabilize. The Renaissance was a time when morally dissolute men like the Duke exercised
absolute power, and as such it is a fascinating study for the Victorians: works like this imply that,
surely, a time that produced magnificent art like the Duchess’s portrait couldn’t have been
entirely evil in its allocation of societal control—geven though it put men like the Duke in power.

A poem like “My Last Duchess” calculatedly engages its readers on a psychological level.
Because we hear only the Duke’s musings, we must piece the story together ourselves. Browning
forces his reader to become involved in the poem in order to understand it, and this adds to the
fun of reading his work. It also forces the reader to question his or her own response to the
subject portrayed and the method of its portrayal. We are forced to consider, Which aspect of the
poem dominates: the horror of the Duchess’s fate, or the beauty of the language and the powerful
dramatic development? Thus by posing this question the poem firstly tests the Victorian reader’s
response to the modern world—git asks, Has everyday life made you numb yet?—gand secondly
asks a question that must be asked of all art—git queries, Does art have a moral component, or is
it merely an aesthetic exercise? In these latter considerations Browning prefigures writers like
Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.