Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote a group of poems following the death of his friend Hallam,

"The Lotos-Eaters" and "Ulysses," both dramatic monologues, being two of them. It is
said that "his poems reflect an insight into the crises of his own age, as well as
appreciation of problems that have faced all men, especially the problems of death, loss,
and yearning for a more stable world" (Mazzeno 3336). Often through the use of familiar
classic figures, Tennyson addresses these problems in his poetry, as he does in the case of
these two poems. Tennyson believed that human nature has a strong "fixation in the past"
and that experience is actually one’s self being acted upon by "that which cannot be
changed" (Tucker 281), or inevitability. However, he also paid special attention to the
concerns of his Victorian world when it came to exploring issues of commitment to duty;
he had great respect for those who served society selflessly. The rhetoric of the age,
"aimed at encouraging one to have faith in oneself and one’s God and press on in the face
of uncertainties" (Mazzeno 3336), is examined extensively throughout Tennyson’s
poetry. Thus, in "The Lotus-Eaters" and "Ulysses" Tennyson uses the ancient voices and
choices of Ulysses and his men to explore commitment to ideals and duty, inevitability
and stasis, death wishes, and dualism.

In both poems, duty and commitment to ideals are treated in multifaceted ways. .
"Ulysses’" argument, at face value, appeals to the Victorian sense of action and hope as
he calls to his men to "follow knowledge like a sinking star" (l 31), and expounds upon
"souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought" (l 46), "noble work" (l 52), and "heroic
hearts" (l 68). A mass of active verbs call his men to action and direct the reader to accept
his decision to leave Ithaca and seek out a new world in their old age (Mazzeno 3340).
After all, he is trapped, idle, on the "barren crags" (l 2), with an old wife, and a "savage
race" of peoples that do not respect or know of his exploits of old. His son would surely
be more suited to the task, and Ulysses has seen to this, stating that Telemachus is
"centered in the sphere of common duties" (l 39). L. Findlay says that the stanza on his
son recognizes the "idea of a smooth transition of power from father to son and the need
to pursue a gradualist course" (382), an honorable thought for a hero or a Victorian.
Frank Mazzeno states, "the duties that Ulysses turns over to Telemachus are ones that
Tennyson and his contemporaries considered important for the continuation of ordered
society" (3340). But are Ulysses’ motives truly noble, or is this purely a propagandist
speech? And is Tennyson appealing to the Victorian need for hope, or is he issuing a
warning against blind faith? A closer look at the poem reveals a great deal of repetition
and circular logic, as if Ulysses is not only attempting to persuade the reader and his men
of his correctness, but also attempting to persuade himself (Findlay 383). In addition, he
seems to view his family, to which his first duty is due, with a cold eye (ll. 3, 33) in
comparison with his exploits, where he has "drunk delight of battle," seen the world, and
was "honored by them all" (ll. 15, 16). And while he pleads the search for knowledge as
his reason for leaving his family and duties behind, his lust for action makes it quite clear
that he is "not a devotee of thought and knowledge;" in fact his speech gives no mention
of concern for his men or their lives, showing that his great "visionary capacities… are
hobbled to his own needs." (Findlay 383) Tennyson may be encouraging his
contemporaries to look beyond the moving language and see the speaker, in this case
Ulysses, for what he really is—an old man longing for the days of his youth, willing to
sacrifice himself and the men loyal to him for one last taste of glory.
Moving language also spills out of the mouths of Ulysses’ men in "The Lotos-Eaters" in
an effort to convince their leader and the readers of their decision to give up their
commitment to a life of travel and duty to their home. After a long time at sea, the men
come upon a land where it is always afternoon (l 4), where everything always "seemed
the same" (l 24), and where the mild natives bring "enchanted" fruit to the weary sailors.
It is pleasant to dream of their homes and families, but they reason that they have
probably already been replaced at home (stanza 6) and that the gods "are hard to
reconcile." They describe their travels as "heaviness," "sharp distress," "perpetual moan,"
and "sorrow." One cannot help but feel sorry for them, and by the end, Ulysses is
convinced that they should give up their travels and stay on the island. The music of the
language and description of the land has the effect of "filling eye and ear at once"
(Saintsbury 224), so that the reader is caught off guard and will agree with Ulysses’ men
that "slumber is more sweet than toil" (l 171). But one must keep in mind that the
travelers are willingly giving up their families and duties, and with the aid of the drug-
filled fruit, have projected their troubles upon the sea, which is their rightful place of
work. Mazzeno says, "The mariners begin to think of their homeland as merely a dream,
too distant a goal, no longer worth striving for" (3337). This idea would not at all have
been smiled upon by either the Victorians or Tennyson, making "The Lotos-Eaters" much
like "Ulysses" in that the true intention of shirking their commitment to ideals and duties
is buried beneath an artful argument designed to trick the listeners/readers into agreeing
with their dishonor. It becomes obvious that they already believe their own argument,
which leads to the idea of inevitability.

The ideas of inevitability and stasis in"Ulysses" and "The Lotos-Eaters" are illustrated by
language, imagery, and dusk. For all of his active verbs, "Ulysses" speaks with language
that can best be described as mournful, full of long Os and As, as in "dole… aged…
roaming… Troy… fades… remains… gray… own… labor… souls… old… noble" and
so on. His description of the land is such that its dreary conditions are sustained in his
own words (Mazzeno 3340). It is obvious that he longs for the good old days and wishes
to return to them, but for all of his talk, one cannot believe that he will actually leave. In
fact, his references to all four elements of the earth, air, fire, and water—"barren crags,"
"scudding drifts," "dim sea," "sunset"—serve not to describe his surroundings but his
inner self (Findlay 381), which is trapped in a sort of death-in-life (Mazzeno 3339). He is
practically already dead, now that he is "become a name" (l 11) and is a part of
everything done in the past, more like a legend or a ghost rather than a real person; he is
closer to the "eternal silence" (l 27) of death than to the noise of his early days. Also, his
cry for the "dark, broad seas" (l 45) at sunset displays Tennyson’s idea of "the deep" or
"dusk," of which Herbert Tucker says, "Tennysonian dusk is a liminal hour, and its
threshold has a clear sensory and psychic direction, away from sight into sound and
feeling, away from character into passion, away from conscious will into mystic
passivity" (283). From the deep comes a moan of many voices, voices of his past, which
by definition, cannot be changed or revisited. Instead of heading out into the wild, blue
yonder in search of glory, one gets the sense from his language, his images, and the
dusky hour that in fact, Ulysses will most likely be seen in the future "standing…
‘forever a listless and melancholy figure on the shore’" (Jump 276).
"The Lotos-Eaters" too projects stasis and inevitability through language, imagery, and
dusk. The similar long vowel sounds, especially prevalent in the second stanza, create a
"sense of repose" (Mazzeno 3336) and "readily gives access to the mediaeval dream
world" (Jump 279). The "mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters" (l 26) appear with their
narcoleptic fruit as "the charmed sunset lingered low adown/in the red West" (ll. 19,20)
and all who eat of it hear the waves as if they are "far far away" (l 33) and their
shipmates’ voices as if "voices from the grave" (l 34). Their stay becomes the inevitable
in this land of dusk, as they, like the flower, become "fast-rooted in the fruitful soil" (l
82). And so as they sit "between the sun and moon upon the shore," they sing their song,
full of "rolling movement and rhythm" (Flaxman 412), in an effort to lure the audience
into believing they are right to stay. As one is caught up in their language, imagery and
dusky pleas, the sense of their stasis becomes in itself inevitable.

Closely related to the themes of inevitability and stasis is the idea of a death wish, which
is also present in "Ulysses" and "The Lotos-Eaters" however oppositely addressed.
"Ulysses" says, "Death closes all; but something ere the end,/ Some work of noble note,
may yet be done" but does not say that there is certainly noble work to be done. He hopes
to reunite with Achilles in the Happy Isles, but this may not happen either (Mazzeno
3339). All that is for certain is that he will die, and probably soon, but this does not stop
him from appealing to his mariners to strike out in search of a new world. It seems as
though he would rather die on a hopeless quest than stay where he is, but despite his
death wish, he will inevitably stay and inevitably die. Similarly, once Ulysses’ men in
"The Lotos-Eaters" taste the fruit, they complain that their own journey towards home is
itself a death wish, and that they are only driving themselves closer to it by labor (stanza
4). They successfully plead for Ulysses to give them "long rest or death, dark death, or
dreamful ease" (l 98). In fact, "The Lotos-Eaters," which was inspired by a waterfall in
the Pyrenees (Fredeman 267), begins to sound like a waterfall with its "repeating rhyme
scheme of ababbcbcc" (Flaxman 412) and lulls the audience’s senses to sleep. After such
an intoxicating effect, one can only surmise that their self-destructive wish to remain in
the slumber of inactivity will be their death.

Finally, like Blake's "The Lamb" and "The Tyger," Tennyson explores dualism, or dual
personalities or capabilities of good and evil in one person, through the shared character
of Ulysses. The Ulysses of "The Lotos-Eaters" is much like the Ulysses of the Odyssey,
the "unconquerable quester" (Mazzeno 3338) and classic hero. He simply serves as
commander and encourager to his men, stating "Courage! This mounting wave will roll
us shoreward soon" (ll. 1, 2) He listens to their complaints and allows them to follow
their desire to stay on the island. However, the Ulysses of "Ulysses" stems more from the
character of Ulisse in Dante’s Inferno, who was "condemned as a deceiver for having led
his men away from Ithaca in search of vain glories" (Mazzeno 3337). His torture of hell-
fire resembles a tongue, since his oratory skills were his greatest manipulatory tool in
life:

Of the old flame forthwith the greater horn

Began to roll, murmuring, as a fire
That labours with the wind, then to and fro
 Wagging the top, as a tongue uttering sounds
Threw out its voice and spake.

After he persuades the men by an appeal to fraternity to go past the pillars of Hercules, he
says, "With these few words I sharpened for the voyage/ The minds of my associates, that
I then/ Could scarcely have withheld them." In other words, "Ulisse mockingly confesses
to the uncertainty of his control over those whom he has just fatally manipulated. He is
alone…." (Findlay 384) And now, in his old age, his persuasion has turned against him in
his desperate attempt to convince himself that there is some honor left for him
somewhere besides his island home. He is old, and alone, leading himself and others
"beyond the sunset, and the baths/ of all the western stars" (ll. 60, 61) towards death. By
addressing dual sides of Ulysses, Tennyson answers Keats’ question on dualism by
showing that heroism and fatal selfishness can exist in the same person, much like the
tyger and lamb can be made by the same God.

Therefore, in "Ulysses" and "The Lotos-Eaters" common themes of commitment to ideals

and duty, inevitability and stasis, death wishes, and dualism are addressed in the use of
Ulysses, his men, and their words. What comes off of the top of the poem is a clean,
heroic vision of Ulysses and his men as they search for honor, glory, and peace.
Underneath, however, a different look presents the men in their most selfish, sluggish and
evil light, as they waste away towards death. It would appear that Tennyson realized that
the human desire for fulfillment and need for faith is so overwhelming, that it is easy to
listen to oneself and to others when the good life seems a promise. So it would seem that
he is warning the Victorians and future generations against such self-deceit, and offers
that there is a time when toil and struggle is necessary for survival, as when the young
mariners were traveling back to their home, and that there is a time, too, when resolve
and stasis becomes one’s honor, as it would have been at the end of Ulysses’ life.