![]() They turn sedentary and go to rust like a tool left out in the rain. They stop learning, stop growing, stop playing, stop challenging themselves. I cannot imagine turning retirement into a sort of ambulatory sleep, as I see in many others. To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! We squint backwards, trying to recall its former light. The past is a distant country, a hazy landscape on the horizon. But as we go through life, we travel further and further away from our experiences, from our connections, our family and friends. Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fadesĮverything we have done, everyone we have met, every place we have been remains part of us, as we are part of them. Even when the stage is as small as our little town, we become caricatures, symbols for those who hate and love us. Which is, again, true of all of us who have trod the stage in some form of public life. ![]() #ULYSSES BY ALFRED LORD TENNYSON SKIN#Something other: a skin he must live in. Bigger than life, and smaller than himself. Don’t we all? Who can forget our youth when we danced, sang and raged against the machine? But he has become an icon – “a name” – that transcends a mere man. Bonds were forged in hardship and battle. Ulysses has seen much, done much, loved, hated, fought, alone and with friends all those years away. Ulysses doesn’t care: he will drain the cup of life to its last drop. In Tennyson’s day, wine and beer were not the polite, filtered drinks of today. Lees, a word seldom heard today outside vintners’ conversations, means dregs: the dead yeast and flocculate of aging. It reminds me of Dylan Thomas in his words, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” What is life but a long draught from a cup? This is one of the lines I heard in the movie. Myself not least, but honour’d of them all Īnd drunk delight of battle with my peers, Much have I seen and known cities of menĪnd manners, climates, councils, governments, That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d I would have raged against those who pursue their own private agendas and petty goals – those who “hoard, and sleep, and feed” instead of reaching for higher goals and the greater good. I often wonder would I be equally dissatisfied had I been returned to council this term, among the “savage race” at the table? Certainly I would have been frustrated and angered as Ulysses by the wooden and uncomprehending heads that populate it now. Their attention is focused on the ground while he scans the sky. ![]() He has lost his connection to the people he rules, and they seem savage to him. Power and position have no chains to bind him to the mundane everyday tasks of governance any more. Ulysses was returned to the role of king and despite its trappings, is dissatisfied with it. Do we drift into retirement after a lifetime of school and work, to paddle downstream, drift with the current towards death? Or do we itch for more adventure? Are we satisfied with who we ae or do we want to be something else? Someone we once were? Everything he left behind has changed – himself most of all – and he wants to be the man he was when facing adversity, years before.īut equally it is about us, all of us, as we age. His wife, years older, is no longer the beauty he left behind when he headed to Troy. His home has lost its former glory and seems barren to him. After ears away, he feels constrained, is restless, and itches to go back out on the road. The poem is ostensibly about Ulysses, the voyager returned from his adventures and his battle in Troy. That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole The poem, a monologue, opens:īy this still hearth, among these barren crags, With both my parents dead, my own age presses upon me in ways it never did before.īut back to Tennyson. What age does to us, what it presents, how we manage it. Not in a maudlin way, but rather as in seeing doors open and new paths to explore, making the most of what I have. Age, especially, seems to shine a new, different light on words and meanings.Īge is one of the things I think about more these days. Or the third, fourth or tenth… Well, perhaps not funny as in humourus. It’s funny how one can read into a poem something entirely different on another reading. I can’t recall exactly when I first read it, but it was in high school, in the 1960s. The poem was written by Tennyson in 1833, but not published until 1842. I recognized it immediately and it made me open the poem and read it again. Last weekend, while watching the delightful movie, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, I heard Bill Nighy make a wedding speech that included lines from one of my favourite poems: Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson. ![]()
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