There will be no tutorial this week. We will discuss "Ulysses" and "My Last Duchess" together in the lecture. Think about all the questions as you study the poems, but focus on those that are in bold.

Check any word you don't understand in a dictionary or glossary of literary terms.

Tennyson's "Ulysses" and Browning's "My Last Duchess"

Both these poems are monologues. In some ways they have more in common with dramatic soliloquies in which an actor, alone on the stage, reveals his or her thoughts, than with other poems we've read spoken by a single voice. (Think back, for example, to the blank verse monologues in King Lear.) Part of the difference from, say, Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and "Ulysses" and "My Last Duchess" lies in the ironic distance between what Ulysses and the Duke of Ferrara say and what they intentionally or unintentionally reveal about themselves as they speak. A further difference from the lyric speakers we've considered so far is that both poets choose "masks". Tennyson bases his dramatic speaker on a classical hero from Ithaca in classical Greece, and Browning fictionalises a historical figure from Ferrara in the late Italian Renaissance. Browning emphasised his self-conscious crossing of genre boundaries when he referred to "My Last Duchess" as a "dramatic lyric" and we generally refer to these poems as dramatic monologues.

"Ulysses"

1. Tennyson bases his dramatic speaker on Dante's reading of Homer's Odysseus. Who was Odysseus? Who was Telemachus? (Check an encyclopaedia or dictionary of literary mythology.)
   
   
2. Who is Ulysses' auditor? What does this tell you about the poem as a whole?
   
   
3. What's Tennyson's Ulysses' attitude to Ithaca? To Ithacans? To his wife? To his son? What does he reveal about himself as he talks about his homeland, his people, his family? (Provide evidence from the text.)
   
   
4. Trace the movement of the speaker's thoughts by distinguishing the three "scenes" the speaker "stages".
   
   
5. J.S. Mill said of Tennyson's poetry that it is capable of summoning up "the state of feeling itself, with a force not to be surpassed by anything but reality". With this in mind, how does the sound of the poem contribute to the feeling Tennyson conjures in "Ulysses"? Read it aloud, looking particularly for his play with long vowel sounds, verbal repetition, enjambment and caesura.
   
   
6. Given what you've read in the handout for the Victorian period (NAEL Vol.2), why might the final line be seen to epitomise Victorian values as does no other? What might the poem as a whole have to say about Victorian attitudes to political, social and familial responsibilities?

 

"My Last Duchess"

7. Who is the Duke's auditor? Why does Browning withhold this information until the last eight lines of the poem? How might knowing who the auditor is help you understand the poetic speaker's purpose?
   
   
8. Which of these nouns would you apply to the Duke? Why? Why not? Menace. Connoisseurship. Power. Powerlessness. Self-certainty. Jealousy. Love. Passion. Coolness.
   
   
9. What is the Duke's judgment of his wife? In the context of the poem, do you trust his judgment?
   
   
10. Why does he draw his auditor's attention to the statue in the closing lines? What does the statue mirror in the poem?
    
    
11. What is it about Browning's choice of language that makes it sound so different from Tennyson's? Again, read it aloud.

Exam Preparation:

For next week's tutorial, review Gulliver's Travels Book IV, and be prepared to respond to a sample exam question based on an extract. You should be able to locate the passage within the text as a whole, and to use it as a starting point for a discussion of points raised in the lecture and the tutorial.