Reading Ulysses in autumn
Photo by Autumn Mott Rodeheaver on Unsplash
Not so long ago, summer drew to a close and the new school year began. Many a harried parent welcomed the fall, enjoying the regained quiet at home while children returned to school. They all got on with the business of life, whether that be catching up on household tasks or focusing more intently on work-at-home employment. For a homeschooling parent like me, however, the fall ushered in distinct challenges.
Yes, I’m used to having all-the-kids with me all-the-time, so summer is generally not so different from the school year, in terms of who’s around the house. But summer still stretches its long and lazy limbs across the calendar for our homeschooling family. I relish days with no agenda, no need to press math or copywork into the hands of reluctant scholars, no need to bustle everyone out the door to co-ops, classes, and lessons. Maybe the kids swirl about while I tap away at the laptop, maybe they play in the sprinkler, or maybe they even just get a little bored being at home, rather than out canvassing the county in the minivan.
As fall began its relentless approach, I began to get a little itchy, as the seams of our days started to pull a bit tighter again. There were lesson plans to prepare, co-op open houses to attend, and tuition to pay for everything under the sun. Summer’s relaxed expanses teetered towards the heavily structured, and sometimes uncomfortably confining, fall days, and I began, ever so slightly, to despair, wondering how we were going to survive it all again.
Turning the corner into fall was particularly piercing this year, for this homeschooling mama, because this summer brought new opportunities to get away, to focus more intently on my own endeavors of work and education. I try to keep these projects going on the side throughout the year, because they bring me inspiration, and connect me to the wider world of thought and art that stretches wide outside our family’s door.
During the school year, daily life offers only fleeting scraps of time to attend to such ventures, but this summer, I had the luxury of two weeks in Texas, on my own, in the consoling company of a creative and joy-filled community of writers. Those heady days lifted the weight of mothering, homeschooling, and housekeeping off my shoulders. Sometimes I felt so light, so unburdened, that I felt like I might walk off the sweltering Houston sidewalks and straight into the sky, leaving the construction, the traffic, and the moss-flung live oaks behind.
And then, I came home.
It was a tough landing, pulling back up onto the rocky shores of reality. There were some tears, even, amidst the pangs of disorienting withdrawal that hit as I returned to regular life. Suddenly I was “Mom” again, on call to cook for eight, to help my eldest with college application essays, and to mediate the toy squabbles between my six-year-old and his little sister. When I came home, the pile of unopened Amazon boxes loomed in a corner, filled with textbooks for the upcoming year, and the wreckage of kids’ neglected bedrooms spilled into the upstairs hallway. I sat down at my laptop, opened my email, and realized there were more than half-a-dozen fall activities I needed to get on the calendar, right away.
It was in this context I happened to turn to Tennyson’s poem, “Ulysses,” again, nudged to read it by Dana Gioia’s newest book of poems and a classmate’s eloquent review of this same text. As I read Tennyson’s poem, I felt a sudden twinge of resonance hearing the lament of Ulysses, who was languishing at home in Ithaca after his return journey from the glorious grit of the Trojan battlefields:
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 must note as an aside that my six children, ages seventeen down to two, are some of the greatest gifts in my life. They are all, for their ages and respective stages, accomplished, sensitive, interesting human beings. They are, like Telemachus in the poem, “discerning” and “decent” in their “offices of tenderness” towards me, my husband, and one another, and I am grateful for each and every one of them. But often they can seem like a savage race that I’m on call to civilize. This is a constant, wearying venture that takes many forms, from potty training, to insisting that pre-teen boys take showers, to reminding every child that dirty socks should not be strewn in the front hall to welcome visitors.)
Although I’ve read “Ulysses” a few times before, it never struck me as relatable. Previously, I interpreted it as a bit of a whine, a bit too much of a masculine wax-nostalgic for bygone days of battle and far-flung adventures. Besides, it had the distasteful bonus of featuring an aged wife as a symbol of all inadequacies of hearth and home. This time, however, I began to feel a surprised sense of kinship for the speaker of the dramatic monologue.
After my summer experiences, I understood the tension in the “hungry heart” of the home-bound Ulysses. I was glad to be back, but longing for what I had left behind, the intellectual equivalent of having “drunk delight of battle with my peers.” I missed the friends I met, who scattered back to their homes across the vast and varied North American continent once our program finished. Yet, as the weeks back home passed, I began to notice that these people, and our shared experiences, though now temporally and geographically distant, were not exactly gone. Healing moments of laughter, expanded friendships, and new ideas curled within me like seeds, then slowly began to swell, unfurling their tentative first leaves. This summer was just the beginning, somehow. Like Ulysses, I felt a bit of vertigo as I sensed this continued in-dwelling, as I realized that “I am part of all that I have met.”
Perhaps Tennyson had a similar sense of lost yet lingering companionship in mind when he wrote this poem in 1833 after the death of a beloved friend. The poem’s main speaker, Ulysses, is a familiar character from the classic literary tradition. He is multifaceted, both the cunning hero of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and the bloodthirsty trickster of Virgil’s Aeneid. He is also the doomed, silver-tongued counselor, destroyed by desires for adventure that outran proper prudence in Dante’s Inferno. Tennyson’s vision of Ulysses is most akin to Dante’s. According to Inferno’s Canto XXVI, Ulysses suffers the flames of hell because he salted the tongues of his friends with his enticing words, until only an ill-sought journey beyond the limits ordained by Providence, could slake their thirst for adventure and knowledge.
I’d like to think that Tennyson’s Ulysses is not quite as baldly presumptuous as Dante’s. “Push off” the old man cries to his mariners, “for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars, until I die.” Though he could conceivably be readying an actual voyage, I envision him instead, sitting on the shore, watching the ships in the harbor strain at their anchor. He dreams out loud, gesticulating in true Mediterranean style, while reclining beside an aged friend who listens and smiles.
Per this vision of the poem—which is only one of various interpretations, to be sure—the monologue ends with Ulysses either teetering on the cusp of decisive action, or making grandiose inspirational speeches while daydreaming about what had been, or what might be. In either case, when Tennyson leaves us with Ulysses at the end of the poem, he is not yet spinning in a whirlwind to his ultimate damnation, per Dante’s vision of his final end. He’s simply a man, standing on the shore, making a restless, yearning, somewhat nostalgic determination “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield;” this is an ambition that is not, in and of itself, destructive.
Photo by Autumn Mott Rodeheaver on Unsplash
If Ulysses’ longing gaze out to the western stars is not inherently harmful, perhaps as readers we too might be invited to consider how our own gaze of longing, our own restlessness, our own desire to “follow knowledge like a sinking star / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought” might be fruitfully, rather than destructively pursued, especially as we forge ahead, submerged in the workaday world of the busy school year. Might there be a proper way—for mothers, fathers, or anyone—to temper the destructive capacity of chasing inordinate desires for that which is not our normal fare?
Perhaps one key might be allowing oneself to at least admit that one’s daily round is not always wholly satisfying. When we admit this fact, we can then settle into the task of figuring out how to fix our dissatisfaction legitimately, all the while staying put, and remaining faithful to loving and serving the people God has placed in our lives.
I’ve watched myself, and many other mothers, get stuck convincing themselves that sacrificial love means allowing significant aspects of their humanity, “to rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use,” while pouring their all into their spouse and children. This leads to a wistful and pernicious pattern of peering through the archways of former experiences (or the experiences of other people via social media) until the siren song of the, “untravell’d world” becomes a destructive force, ending in a desperate whirlpool spiral that makes us really want to run away, and to damn the limits we think our lives have set up for us.
I’d like to propose that we can remain in the midst of our daily rounds and, “follow knowledge like a sinking star.” We can stand on the hill with Ulysses and make use of the creative tension introduced by the desire to strive and seek, without running off solo into the western sunset via horse, boat, or car, abandoning our duties and our loved ones. How we do this, of course, will look different for each of us.
One way forward, perhaps, is to see the place where we are with a new vision. Wallace Stegner, another author I’ve been reading recently, discussed what happened when artists raised on the east coast went west, and encountered the newness and the wildness of the western landscapes for the first time. To even perceive the landscape for what it was, they had to learn to see completely anew. They had to get out of certain habits of perception in which they were stuck, to recategorize the sights they encountered not as strange, foreign, grotesque, but as familiar, welcoming, even beautiful. Finally, they had to learn new ways to communicate what they saw; to paint, to write, to sing what they found adequately and with justice.
While I get back in the swing of schooling my children, I’m not turning my eyes to western canyons, but to mounds of laundry, grocery lists and activity schedules. But perhaps a similar process as that described by Stegner needs to happen every time I find myself reluctant to enter the spaces and structures of a new place or a new season. Motherhood was a new landscape for me seventeen years ago, and much of it was foreign and strange, and my vision of it distorted. My eldest is now poised on the edge of leaving home, and I’m still learning every day how to see mothering and homeschooling as a privilege and a joy.
There were years I did languish, like an idle king (or queen, as the case may be), dissatisfied by the proverbial hearth. But now, on the one hand, my sight has changed. I look at my youngest children, even with all their various quirks and foibles, and they have a luminosity about them that I suspect my older children had too at that age, but that I often missed, because life as a new mother felt so complicated, heavy, confusing.
On the other hand, I’ve realized that no matter how busy my days, and how many people need me, space must be made, even in the tiniest of margins, for creativity, for appreciating beauty, for sustained reading, and for prayer. I’ve often found myself like Ulysses, calling out to others in my community: “come, my friends, / Tis not too late to seek a newer world,” with the hopes that they will not only accompany me, but hold me accountable to the creative endeavors I manage to fit along the edges of mothering, teaching, and housekeeping.
Perhaps with these slight readjustments in our approach to the everyday—learning to see again and making space in the margins for beauty and creativity—the tension of our desires can be channeled towards that which is fruitful rather than destructive. As the long day of summer recedes behind us, and autumn’s slow moon climbs, let us all turn bravely toward the coming days, with the glimmer of the western stars in our eyes.
