Life, love and literature

Alfred Lord Tennyson was a British poet whose legacy included a poem based on the life of Odysseus, a Greek hero who was the subject of the ODYSSEY by Homer. Everyone has heard of the ILIAD and the ODYSSEY!! When the Romans began to absorb the culture of the Greek heroes and gods and goddesses, they renamed them with Roman names. Odysseus became Ulysses. Tennyson called his poem ULYSSES. The story goes that Odysseus was a king from Ithaca who went to fight with other Greeks against the Trojans who had carried off a beautiful woman named Helen! Her husband was joined by many Greek city states to bring her back. Odysseus fought for 10 years in the war, then took 10 more years to make it home to Ithaca where his faithful wife had waited for his return. The elders had long given up hope that he would ever return and urged her to select a new king. She promised that she would choose a new mate as soon as she had finished weaving an elaborate tapestry. Each night in secret she would take out what she had accomplished during the day – so she never had to choose and her husband came home after various adventures that tested him the last 10 years of his voyage home. Everything was just fine for awhile, but ruling his people was a little too tame for the aging king. He became very bored; according to Tennyson, he gathered some of the men he had traveled with those previous years, made plans to set sail and left Ithaca again!! The poet romanticized this group as heroic and stalwart as they ventured into the unknown never to return! The reason I like the quote and like the way it pertains to life being found in literature is that the line itself speaks to the spirit that lives in man to keep on keeping on! I don’t like it that he leaves his wife and people, but that spirit of constantly striving was exhibited by Tennyson’s own countrymen in their real struggles to make it through 2 wars! I can’t think of anyone who better exemplified that spirit than Winston Churchill who led his country through “dark hours“ and the military who fought so hard to keep England free! I know they had to have allies to help defeat the enemy, and I am thankful that America was eventually able to join them in crushing a madman! In our own American Revolution, that same spirit manifested itself as the colonists began the idea of revolution. It must have been difficult to decide to go against everything one had known and accepted for so long. But they fired those shots at Concord and Lexington and there was no turning back.