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Summary of Ulysses Alfred Tennyson was a great and accomplished poet during the Victorian Age, holding Britain’s prestigious position of Poet Laureate. He was a man of many great works with no lack in diversity, writing poems in the lyric, narrative and the dramatic. One of his best dramatic monologues is his poem “Ulysses”. Ulysses (Roman for Odysseus of Homer’s epic) tells the story of the aged War Hero turned King addressing his crew and people, before embarking on a new voyage. In the first stanza of the poem, Ulysses sadly reminisces of the older days, realizing that his present occupation has left him “to rust unburnish’d”. He has grown bored with his respected position, and he sees everything that should be beautiful in his life, his wife, his home, and his lifestyle, with a tired plainness. Ulysses feels he lives without truly living. He finds no rest because he has not journeyed from anywhere to be rightfully weary, and the only things that give him any peace are the memories of his past. Ulysses remembers the joys of drunken battle with his friends on the plains of Troy. He remembers sailing the seas. He remembers all that he “enjoyed greatly,” and “suffered greatly.” He knows now in his old age