2 Responses

1. Robert P. Baird says:

   January 9, 2009

   There’s a nice irony in here, though you have to dig a little to find it.

   Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is based on the 26th canto of the Inferno, in which Ulysses tells Dante what hap­pened after he returned to his wife Pene­lope and son Telemachus in Ithaca. Basi­cally, Ulysses got bored with life on the home front, and he decided to head out for one last jour­ney west through the Straits of Gibral­tar and south to the south­ern hemi­sphere. To rouse his men for the trip, he gave the speech that was the model for Tennyson’s poem:

   ‘O frati,’ dissi, ‘che per cento milia
   perigli siete giunti a l’occidente,
   a questa tanto pic­ci­ola vig­ilia
   d’i nostri sensi ch’è del rima­nente
   non vogli­ate negar l’esperïenza
   di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente.
   Con­sid­er­ate la vostra semenza:
   fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
   ma per seguir vir­tute e canoscenza.’

   (“‘O brothers,’ I said, ‘who throught a hun­dred thou­sand perils have reached the west, to this so brief vigil of our senses that remains, do not deny the expe­ri­ence, fol­low­ing the sun, of the world with­out people. Con­sider your sowing: you were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.’”)

   The only prob­lem is that Ten­nyson (and hence Blago) left off the end of Ulysses’ tale, at least as told by Dante. After Ulysses and his men came within sight of the south pole,

   “n’apparve una mon­tagna, bruna
   per la dis­tanza, e parvemi alta tanto
   quanto veduta non avëa alcuna.
   Noi ci alle­grammo, e tosto tornò in pianto;
   ché de la nova terra un turbo nacque
   e per­cosse del legno il primo canto.
   Tre volte il fé girar con tutte l’acque;
   a la quarta levar la poppa in suso
   e la prora ire in giù, com’ altrui piacque,
   infin che ‘l mar fu sovra noi richiuso.”

   (“‘there appeared to us a moun­tain [i.e. Mt. Pur­ga­tory], dark in the dis­tance, and it seemed to me higher than any I had seen. We rejoiced, but it quickly turned to weep­ing; for from the new land a whirl­wind was born and struck the fore­quar­ter of the ship. Three times it made the ship to turn about with all the waters, at the fourth to raise the stern aloft and the prow to go down, as it pleased another, until the sea had closed over us.”)

   Nine years after Tennyson’s “Ulysses” was pub­lished, the whirlpool that took down Dante’s Ulysses would become the “closing vortex” that swal­lowed Ahab’s Pequod. Given the events of the last month, one can’t help but wonder if Blago’s start­ing to feel a little dizzy yet…

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2. Robert P. Baird says:

   January 19, 2009

   Looks like Stephen Burt has deliv­ered essen­tially the same read­ing over at the Poetry Foun­da­tion, though he stresses, as I should have, the dra­matic irony of Tennyson’s poem. (Belat­edly, I real­ize that my “the only prob­lem is” makes it sound like Ten­nyson didn’t know what he was doing, which I didn’t mean to sug­gest.)

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