A Political Re-reading of the Poem “Ulysses” by Lord Alfred Tennyson

Dr A.V. Koshy

While teaching the poem both my colleague Dr M F Raiyah – an Egyptian

scholar - and I agreed that the poem was a justification of colonialism. Tennyson was
Poet Laureate of England and Ireland at the time of writing this poem and had, as part
of his responsibilities, naturally, to glorify Queen Victoria’s expansionist policies and
the Empire, the Commonwealth. He was not, we were definite, averse to the task. This
far we both agreed. But his reading, especially of the first part of the poem varied
from mine. Another difference was that I came from India which was the ‘jewel in the
crown.’ A third one was I wanted to look at C.P.Cavafy’s idea of Ithaka too. Cavafy
being Greek glorified the ideal Ithaka as the place to go to, and ended up praising the
Odyssey or journey more than the destination. He also spoke of a journey like
Whitman’s passage to “more than India”, one to more than Ithaka.

But Tennyson opens in a suggestively different way; his Ulysses is tired and
bored of /with Ithaca and wants to go back to his wars, and wanderings and
adventures. The first line reminds us of King David whom Ulysses seems not to be
like, he wants to go for war at the right time and not be entrapped by idleness. But the
first disquieting strand in Tennyson’s lines comes suddenly with his diction in “mete
and dole/ unequal laws to a savage race/that hoard and sleep, and feed and know not
me.” Dr Raiyah and I discussed this, and he spoke of the savage race being the
colonized peoples who do not know the Queen, a race made up of the “much have I
seen and known, cities of men/ And manners, climates, councils, governments.”
While I do not disagree with him, I felt this was a leap in interpretation and told him I
wanted to play it safer and felt that the savage race spoken of was the new urban
working class/labourer class in Victorian England. Thus his reading is post colonial
and mine Marxist in the beginning, though mine is also post-colonial because the
word hoard is suggestive as is ‘mete and dole’ for me.

The problem here is deconstruction. The text begins to seemingly dissolve if I

handle it too much as one to be read using close reading techniques. Is Tennyson
suggesting that Ulysses/ Queen Victoria is dissatisfied that he/she only seems to be
giving out laws in return for nothing from a race that only “hoards” and does not do

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anything with what they gained or have? The laws too are, he says, unequal, hinting at
the inequality hidden in all law. But he is after ‘profit.’ The lines from one to five are
very capitalistic in outlook, if one may say so, much much before today’s ruthless,
fully fledged neo-capitalism came on the scene after the fall of the USSR. This and
the implied superiority complex in the first five lines is thus both Tennysonian and
British colonialist, one can say, being aristocratic, anti-class, anti-colonies and pro-
monarchy. ‘Barren crags’ is another interesting usage. Do we apply it to Ithaca or
England or the colonies? Or all?

Quite a potent and typical brew that forces me to say Tennyson was a great
poet but a reprehensible ideologue, representing a reprehensible ruling ideology, that
which is quite cunningly hidden and couched in the art of poesie and then handed
down to countless Indians over the years, by teachers who do not deconstruct, thereby
indulging in a kind of unconscious brainwashing of young impressionable minds
towards considering themselves as “savage” and empire and monarch as something
great, not to mention being conquered in “battle on the ringing plains of windy Troy.”
The effect of these things on the readers of a vanquished janatha must have been quite
horrendous, whereas on the post- Independence crowd it is simply lost in other
supposedly weighty considerations of the metaphors of life as journey/ quest/battle
and to be intensely lived, death as something to be faced with courage and ending in
reward for the worthy etc. While these philosophical or psychological strands are
definitely there, it is also true that the political strands I am teasing out are there too
and should not be pushed under the carpet.

The next lines call to mind the plight and might of the British army and navy
when Ulysses says: “All times I have enjoyed greatly, suffered greatly… both with
those that loved me, and alone; on shore, and when/ Thro' scudding drifts the rainy
Hyades /Vext the dim sea” And then comes the classic Empire defining passage:

The first noticeable thing in it is the curious use of am, suggestive of god-like
status in “I am become a name.” This is Tennyson’s ego but it also defines the so-
called British empire on which the sun never set. We notice again the words
“honoured of them all” and the mention to steel “ringing“on steel, or the joy of
warfare being praised, and then to the three metaphors that show what conquest in

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colonialism is about, being a sword in constant shining use (“How dull it is to pause,
to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!”) extolling the virtue of war and conquet,
having an expanding “margin” – wonder what a Derrida would make of it? And
follow “knowledge” in other cultures…. "to go beyond the utmost bound of human
thought.” The word “sinking” used in that last sentence, does it betray or fortify
Tennyson’s position? Will the knowledge from the new worlds/colonies- help or
hinder? Or is Ulysses praising himself here. The latter, one feels. Why? We come here
to a repetition of a word – the word “hoard,” reminding us of the English derogative
proverb ‘as rich as a Jew.” As before Tennyson/ Ulysses is scornful of hoarding, an
economic error seemingly to him, as one coming from the upper class and writing of a
hero who is a warrior king.

This is different from any Indian household among poor people or lower
middle class people where we tell or are told don’t throw things away, store them, you
never know when they may come in useful, they may come in useful later. Not only
is there implied anti-Semitism and class superiority here again by a rich aristocrat in
the way the word is used but also an unsound economic principle – to store is not in
itself a vice and to hoard is not one unless one has a better alternative to just spending,
like investing and multiplying. Tennyson offers “the savage race” no such option,
showing he would have been a bad king indeed, as is his Ulysses. We are happy he
goes back to wandering, on understanding this. Unfortunately he is the ruling class
and policy makers come from such thinkers who would not speak against the white
man’s burden, so called or colonialism or race or class injustice or gender injustice –
notice how this word is curiously populated only by men and the only woman in it is
one Ulysses happily leaves behind as she is only an “aged wife” to be looked after by
their son, Telemachus.

This brings in Telemachus. He represents, Dr Raiyah and I agreed, the bureaucracy

just as Ulysses represent the powerful armed might of the Empire. The job of the
bureaucracy is to sap the vitality of the populace so that they will not rise in armed
rebellion or start a revolution, according to me, and hence though contemptuous of his
softness, Ulysses agrees that “he works his work, I mine’ and describes the work too
thus: “discerning to fulfill

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This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.”

If this isn’t Tennyson speaking against the dangers of

Marxism/Communism/socialism or of the need to rule with strategy the working class
and the colonies, one does not know what else it is. Both Dr Madhumita Ghosh, on
discussion, and I agreed on this point. This is the so-called humanist face of
colonialism, and on a deeper look it is not so different after all from the inhuman face
of fascism or Stalinism. The choice made by the ruler here in handing over the sceptre
and isle to Telemachus (“well loved of me”) is like that between the soft Hinduism of
a Gandhi and the hawk variety of the RSS, the ruled/ “the rugged people”/ the labour
class/ the colonies are forced to go for the Gandhi variety simply because there is no
third option offered, never a Chandala-centric, Ambedkarite one, for instance. The
principle people like Tennnyson work on here is simple, there is an elite born to rule
and there are others born to be ruled. This was also the principle the British worked
on during the time of colonialism and they had no doubt who the elite were.

I come to the last three points: Ulysses trusts his mariners as they have fought and
defeated even Gods. This is the bond at the core of a power group, but what exactly is
the effect on a reader in India of a line like “Not unbecoming men that strove with
Gods” or of a reference to “the western stars” or of this knowledge of this bond of a
warrior group ready to even die for each other? “Some work of noble note may yet be
done”, one may yet find new worlds to conquer, and…
“Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved heaven and earth; that which we are, we are;
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.”

The dissolution of the Empire and the refusal to give it up are what I see or read in
these lines. The great pity here, for me as an Indian Christian, is the misuse of Jesus’
words in an entirely different context of “seek and ye shall find” by adding “strive”

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before it and “not to yield” after it, in that famous last line of the poem, shifting a
spiritual imperative to a political one, a reply to which was devised by Gandhi doing
the same thing in return to overthrow such an imperative.

It is true that this poem can be read as I said earlier as a dramatic monologue on life,
journey, old age, an elegy on death, an exhortation to live it to the full and be virtuous
and hope to go to heaven etc. As such too it would make a good poem, because of
Tennyson’s innate skills as a great poet in imagery, music, description, narrative,
using figures of speech etc.

But my real question is this – what if I began to teach this poem to my students as an
invitation to follow in the path of reverse colonization and class/caste war, in inverse
in a post-colonial and Marxist manner? Would the capitalistic neo-imperialist
North/West like it?
.
References
1. http://www.portablepoetry.com/poems/alfredlord_tennyson/ulysses.html
2. http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?cat=1&id=74 (Cavafy’s Ithaka)
3. http://www.daypoems.net/plainpoems/2103.html (Whitman’s “Passage to India”)
(Thanks to Dr M.F Raiyah and Dr Madhumita Ghosh.)