![]() This desire to strive for greatness past the bounds of greatness is everywhere in our culture. They often want to come back for one more season, right? This is despite the irrefutable evidence that they have passed their prime and cannot dominate the league as they once did. That’s why I ask my students what happens when great athletes retire. Tennyson writes, “Come, my friends, / ‘T is not too late to seek a new world,” and “…for my purpose holds / To sail beyond the sunset,” and “… 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.” The one thing he wanted while sailing home was to see his wife and kingdom and now that his wife and kingdom are once again before him, what does he want? He wants to sail again. And what is his answer for that boredom? The open sea. I asked my students to read the first stanza and consider: “What does Odysseus think of retirement.” The answer is pretty clear: he’s bored. Tennyson assumes the voice of a battle-trodden Odysseus upon his return to Ithaca. You likely have heard this poem before, even if only in the movie Dead Poets Society. In teaching it, I learned it’s a good first day poem, too, especially for seniors in high school. It wasn’t until the last day that I taught “Ulysses”, and it wound up being a good wrap-up poem. My early poems took after his - meaning, to modern readers, they were stilted and antiquated. The Romantics, primarily John Keats, sparked the love of poetry that eventually saw me teaching the stuff, anyway. Also, teaching a Romantic poem to a British Literature class is like teaching equations in algebra: it comes standard. Any such exercise will either validate what you are already doing or give you something new and effective. I was asked to teach Tennyson’s “Ulysses” to my seniors this semester as part of a curriculum exchange across classes.īreaking away from the tried and true is always a worthwhile experiment in the classroom.
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