Victorian Poetry

HILARY FRASER

what Tennyson saw as "the need of going forward, and braving the struggle
of life." 49 The poem culminates in Ulysses's exhortation:

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.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are, -

(AT 56-67)

Here the ironic double focus afforded by the dramatic monologue places
Ulysses's resolution against our knowledge of the fatal outcome of his final
voyage. The power of the poem, like so many of Tennyson's lyrics, lies in
his choice of a critical historical moment, his suspension of a story at its
penultimate point. This feature reveals the human subject of the poem as
subject to the inexorable movement of time.
"What first comes to light in the nineteenth century," observes Foucault
in The Order of Things, "is a simple form of human historicity - the fact
that man as such is exposed to the event." 50 As we look back from the
vantage-point of the twenty-first century at the multiform attempts by
Victorian poets to come to terms with their fundamental exposure to the
fact of their own historicity, we are reminded that, just as each period of
history has its past, so it has its future. This is a point made particularly
clear when the medievalist poet and Roman Catholic convert the Rev.
Frederick William Faber sanctimoniously observes:

The Future is the open trench, the ground

Whereon our deeds are built, wherein we cast,

As though we did a reverend temple found,

The corner-stones to build another Past. 51

Faber is conscious of his own and his contemporaries' responsibilities to
posterity. Published in 1845 when he followed his spiritual leader, John
Henry Newman, to Roman Catholicism - after the Tractarians' long and
ill-fated struggle to rebuild a revitalized Anglican Church for the nineteenth
century on the historical cornerstone of the Early Church - these lines
suggest the almost religious seriousness with which the Victorian poet
contemplated his place in literary history.

132