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Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses, 1842
Odysseus, whom the Romans called Ulysses, left his island kingdom of Ithaca to fight at Troy. In the traditional telling, the war took ten years, and getting home took ten more.
Now he is home. He is king again, he is old, and the sea he spent half his life crossing is right there at the edge of the town.
His son is grown, capable, and ready to govern. The island is quiet, the people are fed, and by every reasonable measure his story is finished.
He cannot bear it. The whole poem is in his voice, and from the first line he is talking his way out of the ending everyone has written for him.
By the final stanza it is evening and he is standing at the harbor. He is speaking to the men who sailed with him, who are old now too.
He is asking them to come out one more time.
Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
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;
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.
That which we are, we are.
Read it slowly. It is five words long and it does not apologize for a single one of them.
He does not say what is left of us. He does not say considering everything.
He is old, and the men in front of him are old. The poem never once pretends otherwise.
Look at the line just before it. We are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven.
He admits it, out loud, in front of his friends. Then he turns the sentence on a semicolon and refuses to be defined by what he just admitted.
I need you to hear that properly. You have been handed the first half of that sentence every day for years, and almost nobody has handed you the second.
The world is very good at telling a woman what she is not now. It has a hundred ways of saying it, and most of them are polite.
Nobody says that which you are, you are. Nobody says the want you are carrying is still a want, still alive, still yours.
Now look at the order of the last line. To strive, to seek, to find.
Finding comes third. He put it there because that is the true order, and anyone who has wanted something late in life knows he is right.
And then, and not to yield. Everything above it in the stanza is there to hold those four words up.
’Tis not too late to seek. He says it to old men at the water’s edge with the light going.
I am saying it to you, wherever you are reading this, and notice he never promised the finding. He only promised the boat.
This poem is short, free, and nearly two hundred years old. Most of us met its last line on a graduation card and never read what comes before it.
Underneath it I wrote
I am not what I was, and I still want it.
Today. Copy the last four lines by hand, all the way through to “yield,” and do not hurry the semicolon. Underneath, write one sentence that begins “That which I am” and finish it without apologizing. Nobody has to see it.
From an old page
Twenty-some years ago I copied a line from a letter John Keats sent a friend in November 1817. “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination...”
I underlined “nothing” back then. I was younger and liked the drama of it.
Now I underline “certain.” He was twenty-two and unsure of everything, and the one thing he would swear to was the heart’s affections.
That is not a small thing to be sure of. It is the only thing I have ever been sure of either.
