Though hardly one of the strongest sonnets in the sequence, it is one of the most difficult and interesting. The problem can be posed thus: what moral value does the poem assign to Ulysses' actions and, reciprocally, to death?
The text of the sestet as originally printed in
the
As both WMR and Baum show, the question at line 13 has
often been read to intimate that one should (like Ulysses) resist the
(siren) songs of death. But read in terms of a Christian (rather than a Homeric)
mythology, the question is rhetorical, and calls for an acknowledgement
that the songs of death are songs of heavenly promise.
(In the
“songs of death”represent the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres.
The date of the poem's composition is important. All scholars
to this point have followed WMR in dating the poem 1870. But this cannot be correct, because
the text was first printed in the
Added to the proofs for the 1870
DGR revised the sestet heavily in the proofs for the 1870
First printed in September 1869 as part of the
The sonnet builds itself around allusions to Homer's
an echo of Rossetti's
contemplation of suicide in 1868-1869
” (The application of this sonnet . . . not
entirely clear to me
”; he ended by reading it as “an appeal
of the Poet to his own moral conscience, [that] relates to the
question of a noble or degrading tone in the poetry which he affects,
as writer or reader
” (
songs of home”, and hence suggestive of Penelope and Ithaca; and “
songs of Death”, hence suggestive of heaven. The ambiguities are intensified when we read the lines in the general context of the ultimate “
Victory” (line 14) that one may be imagining. The destruction of Troy is a dismal vision, not least of all from the perspective of the infamous Trojan horse.
soul” addressed in this line.