Such description begins as the ship apperoaches the land and Ulysses tells his men to have courage:
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.
All round the coast the languid air did swoon,
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.
Full-faced above the valley stood the moon;
And, like a downward smoke, the slender stream
Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem. (lines 3-9)
Tennyson says this is "A land of streams!" (line 10) and describes those streams and their effects in some detail. After making the appeal of the land clear, Tennyson notes the coming of "The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters" (line 27). The meeting between the Lotos-eaters and the men fro the ship is described in some detail as well, and the transformation of the men from those seeking to return home to those who will say "We will return no more" (line 43) and "Our island home / Is far beyond the wave, we will no longer roam" (lines 44-45). In Homer, the situation is simply reported, while in Tennyson, the situation is made dramatic, leading to the Choric Song as the men express their new view of the world and their determination to remain in this paradisiacal land. Tennyson is interested in the wonders of this land and the almost mystical effect of the lotus. He is not telling the story from the point-of-view of Ulysses and does not say anything about what Ulysses did to counter the changes taking place in his men. In those terms, the story is unresolved, while what Tennyson does create is a poetic image of the transformation and the relationship created between the sailors and the land, significant in itself given the usual tendency to describe sailors and their relationship to the sea, as if the land were only a respite before sailing once more.
The poem "Ulysses" was written a decade after "The Lotos-Eaters" and addresses the attitudes and feelings of Ulysses after the events of the Odyssey. The subject of the poem is thought to be as much Tennyson's recently deceased friend Henry Hallam as Ulysses, though Tennyson finds in the later years of the Greek hero certain evocations of his friend and of his own melancholy at his friend's death. Ulysses in the poem is on his death-bed, as was Hallam before, and this allows Tennyson to create a dramatic situation in which the dying Ulysses speaks to many of his dead sailors. Ulysses by this time has lost faith in the gods, in himself, and even in the future of his kingdom, and this loss of faith is the central issue in the poem and may reflect Tennyson's own questioning of what he has accepted as true in his life.
The sense of loss is palpable in the opening lines:
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...
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