There have been multiple film adaptations and reinterpretations of Homer’s The Odyssey. While none of them have ever successfully adapted the epic poem in its entirety, they all share the premise of a man desperately wanting to go home, having to overcome numerous difficult and dangerous obstacles on the way. The man, guided by his love and determination against all odds, is in the end able to return to his family.

But a couple months ago, I stumbled on a poem related to The Odyssey, which, if ever adapted to film, would be considered a new and interesting interpretation of the classic text:

Ulysses

by Alfred Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d

Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when

Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

‘T is 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.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, 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.

Powerful, right?  This poem seems to be about Ulysses wanting to return to the adventure, which is different from The Odyssey, where he wanted to return home.

It is, in a sense, a chiasmus- “a rhetorical device in which two or more clauses are balanced against each other by the reversal of their structures in order to produce an artistic effect” (literarydevices.net). Popular examples of chiasmus include, “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant” and Shakespeare’s “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”. They are sentences where the phrases, or clauses as the definition states, are inversed, creating parallel, yet different meanings. Like mentioned before, The Odyssey has the idea of Odysseus longing to return home, while Ulysses is centered on him longing to return to adventure, creating relationship built on chiasmus.

As a Writing Arts student focused on the rhetorical nature of writings, I want to compare the tropes and schemes used in both texts, and see if there was a difference that can further support the duality, and which, if ever translated on film, would make for an intriguing experience.

From book five of The Odyssey, there is a moment when Odysseus (Ulysses) talks about
wanting to go home-

“…But still I wish, each and every day to get back home,to see the day when I return. And so, even if out there on the wine-dark sea some god breaks me apart, I will go on—the heart here in my chest is quite prepared to bear affliction. I’ve already had so many troubles, and I’ve worked so hard through waves and warfare. Let what’s yet to come be added in with those.”

It seems like in this part of The Odyssey, Odysseus is so used to and tired of all that he had to go through, that he dares whoever is listening to provide more obstacles, as seen from his use of litotes (ironic understatement) in lines like “And so, even if out there on the wine-dark sea some god breaks me apart” and “ Let what’s yet to come be added in with those.” Unlike what is hinted at in the poem Ulysses, where he mentions good and bad times (in what are known as positive-negative sentences), Odysseus here is used to only bad times- to the point where he is joking with ironic understatements at the constant obstacles. In the Ulysses poem, he is more sincere really thinking about some of those obstacles as fun adventures.

To show that he is not ready to give up in The Odyssey, he uses the metaphor, “the heart here in my chest is quite prepared to bear affliction” (though I thought it could also be Transferred Epithet, where an adjective qualifies a noun other than the person or thing it is actually describing– the heart is said to be prepared when it is really he himself as a determined person).  In Ulysses, the drinking metaphor (“Life to the Lees”) symbolizes him believing that he had given up- not on returning home, but on the adventurous lifestyle, thereby creating a reversal.

Back to The Odyssey, Odysseus uses an interrupted sentence, “But still I wish, each and every day to get back home,to see the day when I return.”, which shows that he has a lot on his mind. I think he also uses an interrupted sentence here- “And so, even if out there on the wine-dark sea some god breaks me apart, I will go on—the heart here in my chest is quite prepared to bear affliction”, but with an afterthought that hammers his point home. These sentences show that he is really thinking on the spot, adding a new point as thinks of it to add weight to what he is saying. In Ulysses, I never see him use an interrupted sentence, and while he does have a lot of memories, he reveals them in an ordered fashion using hypozeugma, the use of a succession of subjects with a single predicate, like in “cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments, myself not least, but honour’d of them all”. This gives an idea that he has been thinking about this subject for a long time, essentially creating lists that connect in a final point. He’s been working on this argument and reasoning in his head for a long time.

So, imagine all those different rhetorical tropes and schemes from Ulysses were used in a film adaptation. The idea of an older Odysseus longing to return to adventure is so against what we’ve read about and seen in The Odyssey, that I believe it could be a visual experience quite unique from other “reinterpretations” and be a great study on the psyche of a man who re-examines the meaning of his life after previously being so disdainful at having one so full of obstacles and dispair.