Ulysses

“Ulysses” is written in blank verse. That means the poem doesn’t rhyme and the overall meter is iambic pentamer, meaning there are five iambs per line (an iamb is a two-syllable foot where an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable). Moreover, “Ulysses” ends with a pristine line of iambic pentameter: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” (Line 70, bolding indicates the stressed syllables).

Blank verse is an appropriate form for a dramatic monologue because a dramatic monologue is spoken out loud, and iambic pentameter is associated with speech. As Aristotle observes in his “Poetics”: “[T]he iambic is, of all measures, the most colloquial we see it in the fact that conversational speech runs into iambic lines more frequently than into any other kind of verse” (Aristotle. “Poetics.” The MIT Internet Classics Archive). Additionally, many of the most famous speeches from Shakespeare’s plays, including all of Hamlet’s soliloquies, are written in blank verse.

Blank verse is also a form linked with the epic tradition. While Homer’s epics were translated into English using rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter, also known as “heroic couplets,” the original ancient Greek poems employed meter but not rhyme. When John Milton wrote his epic Paradise Lost in blank verse, some English readers were surprised and outraged he didn’t using rhyming couplets, but Milton defended his choice of blank verse as being more faithful to Homer and the epic tradition since Homer used meter but did not rhyme (Milton, John. “Introduction to Paradise Lost.” Poetry Foundation).

Tennyson’s blank verse is therefore suggestive of speech and of Homer’s epics, where the character of Ulysses originally comes from.