A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning – John Donne – 1633

The speaker explains that he is forced to spend time apart from his lover, but before he leaves, he tells her
that their farewell should not be the occasion for mourning and sorrow. In the same way that virtuous men
die mildly and without complaint, he says, so they should leave without ―tear-floods‖ and ―sigh-tempests,‖
for to publicly announce their feelings in such a way would profane their love. The speaker says that when
the earth moves, it brings ―harms and fears,‖ but when the spheres experience ―trepidation,‖ though the
impact is greater, it is also innocent. The love of ―dull sublunary lovers‖ cannot survive separation, but it
removes that which constitutes the love itself; but the love he shares with his beloved is so refined and
―Inter-assured of the mind‖ that they need not worry about missing ―eyes, lips, and hands.‖

Though he must go, their souls are still one, and, therefore, they are not enduring a breach, they
are experiencing an ―expansion‖; in the same way that gold can be stretched by beating it ―to aery
thinness,‖ the soul they share will simply stretch to take in all the space between them. If their
souls are separate, he says, they are like the feet of a compass: His lover’s soul is the fixed foot in
the center, and his is the foot that moves around it. The firmness of the center foot makes the
circle that the outer foot draws perfect: ―Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end,
where I begun.‖

Form
The nine stanzas of this Valediction are quite simple compared to many of Donne’s poems, which
utilize strange metrical patterns overlaid jarringly on regular rhyme schemes. Here, each four-line
stanza is quite unadorned, with an ABAB rhyme scheme and an iambic tetrameter meter.

Commentary
―A Valediction: forbidding Mourning‖ is one of Donne’s most famous and simplest poems and also
probably his most direct statement of his ideal of spiritual love. For all his erotic carnality in poems,
such as ―The Flea,‖ Donne professed a devotion to a kind of spiritual love that transcended the
merely physical. Here, anticipating a physical separation from his beloved, he invokes the nature
of that spiritual love to ward off the ―tear-floods‖ and ―sigh-tempests‖ that might otherwise attend
on their farewell. The poem is essentially a sequence of metaphors and comparisons, each
describing a way of looking at their separation that will help them to avoid the mourning forbidden
by the poem’s title.

First, the speaker says that their farewell should be as mild as the uncomplaining deaths of
virtuous men, for to weep would be ―profanation of our joys.‖ Next, the speaker compares harmful
―Moving of th’ earth‖ to innocent ―trepidation of the spheres,‖ equating the first with ―dull sublunary
lovers’ love‖ and the second with their love, ―Inter-assured of the mind.‖ Like the rumbling earth,
the dull sublunary (sublunary meaning literally beneath the moon and also subject to the moon)
lovers are all physical, unable to experience separation without losing the sensation that
comprises and sustains their love. But the spiritual lovers ―Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to
miss,‖ because, like the trepidation (vibration) of the spheres (the concentric globes that
surrounded the earth in ancient astronomy), their love is not wholly physical. Also, like the
trepidation of the spheres, their movement will not have the harmful consequences of an
earthquake.

The speaker then declares that, since the lovers’ two souls are one, his departure will simply
expand the area of their unified soul, rather than cause a rift between them. If, however, their souls
are ―two‖ instead of ―one‖, they are as the feet of a drafter’s compass, connected, with the center
foot fixing the orbit of the outer foot and helping it to describe a perfect circle. The compass (the
instrument used for drawing circles) is one of Donne’s most famous metaphors, and it is the
perfect image to encapsulate the values of Donne’s spiritual love, which is balanced, symmetrical,
intellectual, serious, and beautiful in its polished simplicity.
Like many of Donne’s love poems (including ―The Sun Rising‖ and ―The Canonization‖), ―A
Valediction: forbidding Mourning‖ creates a dichotomy between the common love of the everyday
world and the uncommon love of the speaker. Here, the speaker claims that to tell ―the laity,‖ or
the common people, of his love would be to profane its sacred nature, and he is clearly
contemptuous of the dull sublunary love of other lovers. The effect of this dichotomy is to create a
kind of emotional aristocracy that is similar in form to the political aristocracy with which Donne
has had painfully bad luck throughout his life and which he commented upon in poems, such as
―The Canonization‖: This emotional aristocracy is similar in form to the political one but utterly
opposed to it in spirit. Few in number are the emotional aristocrats who have access to the
spiritual love of the spheres and the compass; throughout all of Donne’s writing, the membership
of this elite never includes more than the speaker and his lover—or at the most, the speaker, his
lover, and the reader of the poem, who is called upon to sympathize with Donne’s romantic plight.

THEMES
Lovers as Microcosms
Donne incorporates the Renaissance notion of the human body as a microcosm into his love
poetry. During the Renaissance, many people believed that the microcosmic human body mirrored
the macrocosmic physical world. According to this belief, the intellect governs the body, much like
a king or queen governs the land. Many of Donne’s poems—most notably ―The Sun Rising‖
(1633), ―The Good-Morrow‖ (1633), and ―A Valediction: Of Weeping‖ (1633)—envision a lover or
pair of lovers as being entire worlds unto themselves. But rather than use the analogy to imply that
the whole world can be compressed into a small space, Donne uses it to show how lovers become
so enraptured with each other that they believe they are the only beings in existence. The lovers
are so in love that nothing else matters. For example, in ―The Sun Rising,‖ the speaker concludes
the poem by telling the sun to shine exclusively on himself and his beloved. By doing so, he says,
the sun will be shining on the entire world.

The Neoplatonic Conception of Love

Donne draws on the Neoplatonic conception of physical love and religious love as being two
manifestations of the same impulse. In the Symposium (ca. third or fourth century b.c.e.), Plato
describes physical love as the lowest rung of a ladder. According to the Platonic formulation, we
are attracted first to a single beautiful person, then to beautiful people generally, then to beautiful
minds, then to beautiful ideas, and, ultimately, to beauty itself, the highest rung of the ladder.
Centuries later, Christian Neoplatonists adapted this idea such that the progression of love
culminates in a love of God, or spiritual beauty. Naturally, Donne used his religious poetry to
idealize the Christian love for God, but the Neoplatonic conception of love also appears in his love
poetry, albeit slightly tweaked. For instance, in the bawdy ―Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going to
Bed‖ (1669), the speaker claims that his love for a naked woman surpasses pictorial
representations of biblical scenes. Many love poems assert the superiority of the speakers’ love to
quotidian, ordinary love by presenting the speakers’ love as a manifestation of purer, Neoplatonic
feeling, which resembles the sentiment felt for the divine.

Religious Enlightenment as Sexual Ecstasy

Throughout his poetry, Donne imagines religious enlightenment as a form of sexual ecstasy. He
parallels the sense of fulfillment to be derived from religious worship to the pleasure derived from
sexual activity—a shocking, revolutionary comparison, for his time. In Holy Sonnet 14 (1633), for
example, the speaker asks God to rape him, thereby freeing the speaker from worldly concerns.
Through the act of rape, paradoxically, the speaker will be rendered chaste. In Holy
Sonnet 18 (1899), the speaker draws an analogy between entering the one true church and
entering a woman during intercourse. Here, the speaker explains that Christ will be pleased if the
speaker sleeps with Christ’s wife, who is ―embraced and open to most men‖ (14). Although these
poems seem profane, their religious fervor saves them from sacrilege or scandal. Filled with
religious passion, people have the potential to be as pleasurably sated as they are after sexual
activity.

The Search for the One True Religion

Donne’s speakers frequently wonder which religion to choose when confronted with so many
churches that claim to be the one true religion. In 1517, an Augustinian monk in Germany named
Martin Luther set off a number of debates that eventually led to the founding of Protestantism,
which, at the time, was considered to be a reformed version of Catholicism. England developed
Anglicanism in 1534, another reformed version of Catholicism. This period was thus dubbed the
Reformation. Because so many sects and churches developed from these religions, theologians
and laypeople began to wonder which religion was true or right. Written while Donne was
abandoning Catholicism for Anglicanism, ―Satire 3‖ reflects these concerns. Here, the speaker
wonders how one might discover the right church when so many churches make the same claim.
The speaker of Holy Sonnet 18 asks Christ to explain which bride, or church, belongs to Christ.
Neither poem forthrightly proposes one church as representing the true religion, but nor does
either poem reject outright the notion of one true church or religion.

SYMBOLS
Angels
Angels symbolize the almost-divine status attained by beloveds in Donne’s love poetry. As divine
messengers, angels mediate between God and humans, helping humans become closer to the
divine. The speaker compares his beloved to an angel in ―Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going to
Bed.‖ Here, the beloved, as well as his love for her, brings the speaker closer to God because with
her, he attains paradise on earth. According to Ptolemaic astronomy, angels governed the
spheres, which rotated around the earth, or the center of the universe. In ―Air and Angels‖ (1633),
the speaker draws on Ptolemaic concepts to compare his beloved to the aerial form assumed by
angels when they appear to humans. Her love governs him, much as angels govern spheres. At
the end of the poem, the speaker notes that a slight difference exists between the love a woman
feels and the love a man feels, a difference comparable to that between ordinary air and the airy
aerial form assumed by angels.

The Compass
Perhaps the most famous conceit in all of metaphysical poetry, the compass symbolizes the
relationship between lovers: two separate but joined bodies. The symbol of the compass is
another instance of Donne’s using the language of voyage and conquest to describe relationships
between and feelings of those in love. Compasses help sailors navigate the sea, and,
metaphorically, they help lovers stay linked across physical distances or absences. In ―A
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,‖ the speaker compares his soul and the soul of his beloved to a
so-called twin compass. Also known as a draftsman’s compass, a twin compass has two legs, one
that stays fixed and one that moves. In the poem, the speaker becomes the movable leg, while his
beloved becomes the fixed leg. According to the poem, the jointure between them, and the
steadiness of the beloved, allows the speaker to trace a perfect circle while he is apart from her.
Although the speaker can only trace this circle when the two legs of the compass are separated,
the compass can eventually be closed up, and the two legs pressed together again, after the circle
has been traced.

Blood
Generally blood symbolizes life, and Donne uses blood to symbolize different experiences in life,
from erotic passion to religious devotion. In ―The Flea‖ (1633), a flea crawls over a pair of would-
be lovers, biting and drawing blood from both. As the speaker imagines it, the blood of the pair has
become intermingled, and thus the two should become sexually involved, since they are already
married in the body of the flea. Throughout the Holy Sonnets, blood symbolizes passionate
dedication to God and Christ. According to Christian belief, Christ lost blood on the cross and died
so that humankind might be pardoned and saved. Begging for guidance, the speaker in Holy
Sonnet 7 (1633) asks Christ to teach him to be penitent, such that he will be made worthy of
Christ’s blood. Donne’s religious poetry also underscores the Christian relationship between
violence, or bloodshed, and purity. For instance, the speaker of Holy Sonnet 9 (1633) pleads that
Christ’s blood might wash away the memory of his sin and render him pure again.

The Tyger – William Blake – 1794

The poem begins with the speaker asking a fearsome tiger what kind of divine being could have
created it: ―What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame they fearful symmetry?‖ Each subsequent
stanza contains further questions, all of which refine this first one. From what part of the cosmos
could the tiger’s fiery eyes have come, and who would have dared to handle that fire? What sort of
physical presence, and what kind of dark craftsmanship, would have been required to ―twist the
sinews‖ of the tiger’s heart? The speaker wonders how, once that horrible heart ―began to beat,‖
its creator would have had the courage to continue the job. Comparing the creator to a blacksmith,
he ponders about the anvil and the furnace that the project would have required and the smith who
could have wielded them. And when the job was done, the speaker wonders, how would the
creator have felt? ―Did he smile his work to see?‖ Could this possibly be the same being who
made the lamb?

Form

The poem is comprised of six quatrains in rhymed couplets. The meter is regular and rhythmic, its
hammering beat suggestive of the smithy that is the poem’s central image. The simplicity and neat
proportions of the poems form perfectly suit its regular structure, in which a string of questions all
contribute to the articulation of a single, central idea.

Analysis

The opening question enacts what will be the single dramatic gesture of the poem, and each
subsequent stanza elaborates on this conception. Blake is building on the conventional idea that
nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is strikingly
beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence. What kind of a God, then, could or would
design such a terrifying beast as the tiger? In more general terms, what does the undeniable
existence of evil and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God, and what does it mean
to live in a world where a being can at once contain both beauty and horror?

The tiger initially appears as a strikingly sensuous image. However, as the poem progresses, it
takes on a symbolic character, and comes to embody the spiritual and moral problem the poem
explores: perfectly beautiful and yet perfectly destructive, Blake’s tiger becomes the symbolic
center for an investigation into the presence of evil in the world. Since the tiger’s remarkable
nature exists both in physical and moral terms, the speaker’s questions about its origin must also
encompass both physical and moral dimensions. The poem’s series of questions repeatedly ask
what sort of physical creative capacity the ―fearful symmetry‖ of the tiger bespeaks; assumedly
only a very strong and powerful being could be capable of such a creation.
The smithy represents a traditional image of artistic creation; here Blake applies it to the divine
creation of the natural world. The ―forging‖ of the tiger suggests a very physical, laborious, and
deliberate kind of making; it emphasizes the awesome physical presence of the tiger and
precludes the idea that such a creation could have been in any way accidentally or haphazardly
produced. It also continues from the first description of the tiger the imagery of fire with its
simultaneous connotations of creation, purification, and destruction. The speaker stands in awe of
the tiger as a sheer physical and aesthetic achievement, even as he recoils in horror from the
moral implications of such a creation; for the poem addresses not only the question of who could
make such a creature as the tiger, but who would perform this act. This is a question of creative
responsibility and of will, and the poet carefully includes this moral question with the consideration
of physical power. Note, in the third stanza, the parallelism of ―shoulder‖ and ―art,‖ as well as the
fact that it is not just the body but also the ―heart‖ of the tiger that is being forged. The repeated
use of word the ―dare‖ to replace the ―could‖ of the first stanza introduces a dimension of
aspiration and willfulness into the sheer might of the creative act.

The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the reader that a tiger and a lamb
have been created by the same God, and raises questions about the implications of this. It also
invites a contrast between the perspectives of ―experience‖ and ―innocence‖ represented here and
in the poem ―The Lamb.‖ ―The Tyger‖ consists entirely of unanswered questions, and the poet
leaves us to awe at the complexity of creation, the sheer magnitude of God’s power, and the
inscrutability of divine will. The perspective of experience in this poem involves a sophisticated
acknowledgment of what is unexplainable in the universe, presenting evil as the prime example of
something that cannot be denied, but will not withstand facile explanation, either. The open awe of
―The Tyger‖ contrasts with the easy confidence, in ―The Lamb,‖ of a child’s innocent faith in a
benevolent universe.

Ode on a Grecian Urn – John Keats – 1819

In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it. He is
preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time. It is the ―still unravish’d bride of
quietness,‖ the ―foster-child of silence and slow time.‖ He also describes the urn as a ―historian‖
that can tell a story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend
they depict and from where they come. He looks at a picture that seems to depict a group of men
pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could be: ―What mad pursuit? What
struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?‖

In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man
playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of trees. The speaker says that the piper’s
―unheard‖ melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are unaffected by time. He
tells the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should not
grieve, because her beauty will never fade. In the third stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding
the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed their leaves. He is happy for the piper because
his songs will be ―for ever new,‖ and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever,
unlike mortal love, which lapses into ―breathing human passion‖ and eventually vanishes, leaving
behind only a ―burning forehead, and a parching tongue.‖

In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a group of
villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going (―To what green altar,
O mysterious priest...‖) and from where they have come. He imagines their little town, empty of all
its citizens, and tells it that its streets will ―for evermore‖ be silent, for those who have left it, frozen
on the urn, will never return. In the final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying
that it, like Eternity, ―doth tease us out of thought.‖ He thinks that when his generation is long
dead, the urn will remain, telling future generations its enigmatic lesson: ―Beauty is truth, truth
beauty.‖ The speaker says that that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it needs to
know.

Form
―Ode on a Grecian Urn‖ follows the same ode-stanza structure as the ―Ode on Melancholy,‖
though it varies more the rhyme scheme of the last three lines of each stanza. Each of the five
stanzas in ―Grecian Urn‖ is ten lines long, metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter, and
divided into a two part rhyme scheme, the last three lines of which are variable. The first seven
lines of each stanza follow an ABABCDE rhyme scheme, but the second occurrences of the CDE
sounds do not follow the same order. In stanza one, lines seven through ten are rhymed DCE; in
stanza two, CED; in stanzas three and four, CDE; and in stanza five, DCE, just as in stanza one.
As in other odes (especially ―Autumn‖ and ―Melancholy‖), the two-part rhyme scheme (the first part
made of AB rhymes, the second of CDE rhymes) creates the sense of a two-part thematic
structure as well. The first four lines of each stanza roughly define the subject of the stanza, and
the last six roughly explicate or develop it. (As in other odes, this is only a general rule, true of
some stanzas more than others; stanzas such as the fifth do not connect rhyme scheme and
thematic structure closely at all.)

In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it. He is
preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time. It is the ―still unravish’d bride of
quietness,‖ the ―foster-child of silence and slow time.‖ He also describes the urn as a ―historian‖
that can tell a story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend
they depict and from where they come. He looks at a picture that seems to depict a group of men
pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could be: ―What mad pursuit? What
struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?‖

In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man
playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of trees. The speaker says that the piper’s
―unheard‖ melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are unaffected by time. He
tells the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should not
grieve, because her beauty will never fade. In the third stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding
the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed their leaves. He is happy for the piper because
his songs will be ―for ever new,‖ and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever,
unlike mortal love, which lapses into ―breathing human passion‖ and eventually vanishes, leaving
behind only a ―burning forehead, and a parching tongue.‖

In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a group of
villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going (―To what green altar,
O mysterious priest...‖) and from where they have come. He imagines their little town, empty of all
its citizens, and tells it that its streets will ―for evermore‖ be silent, for those who have left it, frozen
on the urn, will never return. In the final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying
that it, like Eternity, ―doth tease us out of thought.‖ He thinks that when his generation is long
dead, the urn will remain, telling future generations its enigmatic lesson: ―Beauty is truth, truth
beauty.‖ The speaker says that that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it needs to
know.
Form

―Ode on a Grecian Urn‖ follows the same ode-stanza structure as the ―Ode on Melancholy,‖
though it varies more the rhyme scheme of the last three lines of each stanza. Each of the five
stanzas in ―Grecian Urn‖ is ten lines long, metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter, and
divided into a two part rhyme scheme, the last three lines of which are variable. The first seven
lines of each stanza follow an ABABCDE rhyme scheme, but the second occurrences of the CDE
sounds do not follow the same order. In stanza one, lines seven through ten are rhymed DCE; in
stanza two, CED; in stanzas three and four, CDE; and in stanza five, DCE, just as in stanza one.
As in other odes (especially ―Autumn‖ and ―Melancholy‖), the two-part rhyme scheme (the first part
made of AB rhymes, the second of CDE rhymes) creates the sense of a two-part thematic
structure as well. The first four lines of each stanza roughly define the subject of the stanza, and
the last six roughly explicate or develop it. (As in other odes, this is only a general rule, true of
some stanzas more than others; stanzas such as the fifth do not connect rhyme scheme and
thematic structure closely at all.)

Ulysses – Alfred Lord Tennyson – 1842

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.

Sailing to Byzantium – William Butler Yeats -1927

The speaker, referring to the country that he has left, says that it is ―no country for old men‖: it is
full of youth and life, with the young lying in one another’s arms, birds singing in the trees, and fish
swimming in the waters. There, ―all summer long‖ the world rings with the ―sensual music‖ that
makes the young neglect the old, whom the speaker describes as ―Monuments of unageing
intellect.‖

An old man, the speaker says, is a ―paltry thing,‖ merely a tattered coat upon a stick, unless his
soul can clap its hands and sing; and the only way for the soul to learn how to sing is to study
―monuments of its own magnificence.‖ Therefore, the speaker has ―sailed the seas and come / To
the holy city of Byzantium.‖ The speaker addresses the sages ―standing in God’s holy fire / As in
the gold mosaic of a wall,‖ and asks them to be his soul’s ―singing-masters.‖ He hopes they will
consume his heart away, for his heart ―knows not what it is‖—it is ―sick with desire / And fastened
to a dying animal,‖ and the speaker wishes to be gathered ―Into the artifice of eternity.‖

The speaker says that once he has been taken out of the natural world, he will no longer take his
―bodily form‖ from any ―natural thing,‖ but rather will fashion himself as a singing bird made of
hammered gold, such as Grecian goldsmiths make ―To keep a drowsy Emperor awake,‖ or set
upon a tree of gold ―to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Or what is past, or passing, or to
come.‖
Form

The four eight-line stanzas of ―Sailing to Byzantium‖ take a very old verse form: they are metered
in iambic pentameter, and rhymed ABABABCC, two trios of alternating rhyme followed by a
couplet.

Commentary

―Sailing to Byzantium‖ is one of Yeats’s most inspired works, and one of the greatest poems of the
twentieth century. Written in 1926 and included in Yeats’s greatest single collection, 1928’s The
Tower, ―Sailing to Byzantium‖ is Yeats’s definitive statement about the agony of old age and the
imaginative and spiritual work required to remain a vital individual even when the heart is
―fastened to a dying animal‖ (the body). Yeats’s solution is to leave the country of the young and
travel to Byzantium, where the sages in the city’s famous gold mosaics (completed mainly during
the sixth and seventh centuries) could become the ―singing-masters‖ of his soul. He hopes the
sages will appear in fire and take him away from his body into an existence outside time, where,
like a great work of art, he could exist in ―the artifice of eternity.‖ In the astonishing final stanza of
the poem, he declares that once he is out of his body he will never again appear in the form of a
natural thing; rather, he will become a golden bird, sitting on a golden tree, singing of the past
(―what is past‖), the present (that which is ―passing‖), and the future (that which is ―to come‖).

A fascination with the artificial as superior to the natural is one of Yeats’s most prevalent themes.
In a much earlier poem, 1899’s ―The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart,‖ the speaker expresses
a longing to re-make the world ―in a casket of gold‖ and thereby eliminate its ugliness and
imperfection. Later, in 1914’s ―The Dolls,‖ the speaker writes of a group of dolls on a shelf,
disgusted by the sight of a human baby. In each case, the artificial (the golden casket, the
beautiful doll, the golden bird) is seen as perfect and unchanging, while the natural (the world, the
human baby, the speaker’s body) is prone to ugliness and decay. What is more, the speaker sees
deep spiritual truth (rather than simply aesthetic escape) in his assumption of artificiality; he
wishes his soul to learn to sing, and transforming into a golden bird is the way to make it capable
of doing so.

―Sailing to Byzantium‖ is an endlessly interpretable poem, and suggests endlessly fascinating

comparisons with other important poems—poems of travel, poems of age, poems of nature,
poems featuring birds as symbols. (One of the most interesting is surely Keats’s ―Ode to a
Nightingale,‖ to which this poem is in many ways a rebuttal: Keats writes of his nightingale, ―Thou
wast not born for death, immortal Bird! / No hungry generations tread thee down‖; Yeats, in the
first stanza of ―Sailing to Byzantium,‖ refers to ―birds in the trees‖ as ―those dying generations.‖) It
is important to note that the poem is not autobiographical; Yeats did not travel to Byzantium (which
was renamed Constantinople in the fourth century A.D., and later renamed Istanbul), but he did
argue that, in the sixth century, it offered the ideal environment for the artist. The poem is about an
imaginative journey, not an actual one.
Journey of the Magi – T.S Elliot - 1927
The poem begins with the speaker listing out all of the troubles he and his men faced on their way
to the manger in which Christ was born. The weather was freezing and there was hardly any food
or shelter. Every time they came to a town they were turned away. Even the camels were
suffering.

In the second stanza, the men get to where they were going and find it to be simply, ―satisfactory.‖
The manager has no great presence but that doesn’t mean the experience wasn’t important.

The true impact of the journey and meeting comes after the men have returned home. They are no
longer the people they were before they set off. The speaker states that he longs for a second
death through which he is able to join God.