Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, February 7th, 2025.

Today's poem is a selection from one by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

The poem is Ulysses. If you are a subscriber to the daily

poem, yesterday you heard the first two stanzas of this work, and today will be the third and final

stanza, which is the most exerted portion of the poem.

In fact, the poem's most famous line is easily its final line, but it's often misquoted

or misapplied because it's lacking the surrounding context.

So what's happening in this poem, and it's important I mentioned yesterday that it's called

Ulysses rather than Odysseus.

This is very much the more Roman and Italian tradition around this character who goes home

after the Trojan War, where he's very hard to get home to Ithaca and his wife Penelope

after the Trojan War. But according to Dante, ends up leaving again in order to sail to the

ends of the earth, which is a disastrous journey for him. And he ends up dead. And then in the

inferno, not necessarily for that journey, but because of

deeds that he did in enduring the Trojan War. But Tennyson seems to have tried to answer the

question, why? Why would Odysseus? Why would any version of Odysseus do this? Why would he leave

home at all? In fact, his method or the manner of his demise, according to Dante, is that in sailing to the ends of the earth, he actually comes to the shores of the island of Mount Purgatory, which no mortal is supposed to set foot on while alive. And so the guardians of that island, the angels or the

spirit of God sink his ship. And he and his crew perish in sight of this island, which he will

make a kind of elusive reference to in this final stanza.

The desire, though, is a laudable one, and I think many pick up on that in this final stanza.

In fact, you could argue that even a character like Reapachep the Mouse in C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treter, is inspired by the image of Ulysses in this poem,

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