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
Vex’t 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 honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am 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 fulfil
This labour, 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 has 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,
‘Tis 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 the 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.
I don’t what event, if any, caused you to present Tennyson’s beautiful poem, but thanks very much for doing it. My Father and Grandfather, both English and educated the English way, could recite Tennyson while I wondered how anyone could remember such complex and, to me at that time, meaningless phrases. But then, I was educated in the American way, and made to memorize very little.
I love this poem. Hadn’t read it for a while, thank you for reminding me of it. The last line always stays with me.
Best of luck on your test. I’m so very grateful that you’re taking it instead of me!
‘One equal-temper of heroic hearts,’
Shipmates, squadronmates, platoon buddies: the people who will raz you without mercy–but won’t let anyone outside the tribe mess with you.
’cause they ain’t family
Thanks for reminding me of that one, Lex. I find it a comfort to me as I get old.
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
How very curious that you should riposte with that, Ima – It once meant something to one who once meant a very great deal to me. I do not suppose that you and I have met before?
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great.
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
–No Second Troy, W.B. Yeats
There is nothing more frustrating and tantalizing to me than to know I am in the presence of something that I don’t quite understand… the currents and eddys brush past me, but are just not solid enough–like grasping cobwebs.
Shipmates,
And therein lies the rub…. as Hamlet might opine…
Ulysses…handed down to those generations who will follow,
Where one side seeks to find the enobling drive within a man, a drive that makes him seek those for-off shores he has yet to lay eyes upon, to strive once more, his might and brain against the unrelenting seas… crashing their breakers upon the bulwarks of his determination, pitting his own courage against the cold remorseless hand of fate, of death, of finality, in one last surge of heroistic passion.
An attempt to try his mortality against the steel-hard sheild of death, and yet there gain the immortality of long-remembered song and respect. One last hurl of chance’s dice against the call of fate and happenstance. To drive the prow of his own vessel against God’s unrelenting seas…. and thereby win through losing….
Versus Ozymandias…
Whose admonition to those gazing upon his efforts is: Why Try? You will only meet with death, and though you try with all your might and skill, still yet the overblowing sands of time will drown your efforts and disburse your memory as a single grain of sand amongst the dunes….. Why waste your efforts? Why waste your precious time persuing that which you shall never gain?
I know that, to my mind, Ulysses’ path is always the better choice. To fight, to get beat down, to rise and fight again rather than submit. Better to glory in the chance of victory than to sleep in the certainty of death and defeat.
Generations sing the songs of Ulysses, and remember him and his men for the heroes they were. Ozymandias is remembered only by those who fear to challenge death, who caution the bold because they themselves dare not venture their own lives upon some distant and implausible reward.
As was said by a better writer than I will ever be: “The coward dies a thousand deaths, but the valiant never tastes of death but once…”
Respects,
AW1 Tim
I don’t think we met, becase I would remember a pilot who was into my favorite poet.
That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
Well, that’s a relief I suppose. We each of us have our own Maude Gonne. It would have been passing strange, after all the discussion we have had, to find out that you were mine.