This noble poem, which is said to have induced Sir Robert Peel to give Tennyson his pension, was written soon after Arthur Hallam's death, presumably therefore in 1833. "It gave my feeling," Tennyson said to his son, "about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything in 'In Memoriam'." It is not the 'Ulysses' of Homer, nor was it suggested by the 'Odyssey'. The germ, the spirit and the sentiment of the poem are from the twenty-sixth canto of Dante's 'Inferno', where Ulysses in the Limbo of the Deceivers speaks from the flame which swathes him. I give a literal version of the passage:--

"Neither fondness for my son nor reverence for my aged sire nor the
due love which ought to have gladdened Penelope could conquer in me
the ardour which I had to become experienced in the world and in human
vice and worth. I put out into the deep open sea with but one ship and
with that small company which had not deserted me.... I and my
companions were old and tardy when we came to that narrow pass where
Hercules assigned his landmarks. 'O brothers,' I said, 'who through a
hundred thousand dangers have reached the West deny not to this the
brief vigil of your senses that remain, experience of the unpeopled
world beyond the sun. Consider your origin, ye were not formed to live
like Brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.... Night already saw
the other pole with all its stars and ours so low that it rose not
from the ocean floor'"('Inferno', xxvi., 94-126).

But if the germ is here the expansion is Tennyson's; he has added elaboration and symmetry, fine touches, magical images and magical diction. There is nothing in Dante which answers to--

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

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.

Of these lines well does Carlyle say what so many will feel: "These lines do not make me weep, but there is in me what would till whole Lacrymatorics as I read".