"Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (poetry reading)

Ulysses' dramatic monologue. He's back from ten-years of wandering and fighting. Now he's bored with the easy life and he wants to push off again and look for some more adventures.

The audio isn't processed in any way, except to remove background noises. There's no reverb, no echo, no compression.

The wiki article on Ulysses is comprehensive:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(poem)

You can hear Sir Lewis Casson read it here, about 50 years ago:
http://charon.sfsu.edu/TENNYSON/ULYSSES.HTML

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea. I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known,-- cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honor'd of them all,--
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
to whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,--
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me,--
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads,-- you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
'T is 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.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Ulysses
• Tennyson

[DaBlaade]

"Match'd with an aged wife" -- how deliciously sexist!

[SpokenVerse]

@DaBlaade Penelope waited for him faithfully for ten years while he found his way home from Troy. When he got back he killed all her suitors. But in the meantime he had a number of affairs and fathered children: there was Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa, Kallidike. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood tells the story from Penelope's point of view.

[14152424]

Your voice is wonderful. This is really great work.

[FrankiiDoodle]

@SpokenVerse 20 years; the Trojan War itself was 10 years and then 10 to get back

[bubbledreamxox]

Thanks so much for this, studying for exams and it's great to hear it read so well!

[lqzfanSE207HW]

The comment by daBlaade is ill-informed. Odysseus was away for approximately twenty years, not ten; he fathered no children in all that time away; the 'affairs' the writer refers to were both in varying degress the result of compulsion, the first with nymph-witch Circe in order to secure the release of his transmogrified men and then with Calypso, a goddess-nymph who kept him a virtual prisoner on her island as her lover. Odysseus never lays a hand on Nausicaa and 'Kallidike' does not exist.

[BringBackMy9Os]

The poem quoted in Babylon 5 :)

[ampleoppourtunity]

Damn...he sounds so much like Odeyssey.

I'm quite sure that will make you to become a name in my head.

This poem has been my everyday prayer since 2004.

Thanks that you are able to put in up in video.

I recites it along with you as a child in the nursery...

yearning to comprehend this piece of work to the content of my heart.

and not to yield.

[sapphirecat]

absolutely lovely, you have a great voice

[gdprosper]

I too have been waiting on this poem for a long time. Excellent.

[hyacinthegirl]

oh i've been waiting ages for you to do this one! thank you! love the emotion in your voice.

[thallassocracy]

I remember the shock I felt when I first discovered that this piece was written by a young man;- but I suppose so was The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock (which I have always assumed is based on it).

I suppose it's a shirker poem (He works his work, I mine), and not so very different from what Kurt Cobain was on about most of the time.

You negotiated that very difficult half-line "Push off!" with consummate mastery (Lewis Casson comes adrift there).

A magnificently dyspeptic version.