"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...."See in text(Ulysses)
Ulysses advises his mariners not to give in to old age just yet. He acknowledges the inevitability of death, but suggests that more may be accomplished—“Some work of noble note”—in the meantime. Further, because his men were brave and “strove with Gods,” Ulysses believes that they are particularly capable of living full lives even though they are old.
"How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!..."See in text(Ulysses)
Ulysses applies to himself the simile of “rusty mail,” or rusted armor, deployed by Odysseus in Troilus and Cressida, a Shakespearean tragedy written in approximately 1602. In the play, Odysseus tells Achilles that “perseverance...Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang/ Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail/ In monumental mockery.” For Tennyson’s Ulysses, to become idle is to become dull like unused metal. However, to persevere against idleness offers hope; by sailing into “the western stars,” Ulysses may find paradise instead of the “eternal silence” of the underworld.
