To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

This is the last line of “Ulysses”. Back in Ithaca after his wanderings, the ageing hero leaves his kingdom to his son Telemachus and calls his old mariners to one last voyage: “Come, my friends, / ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.” He means to sail “beyond the sunset” until he dies; perhaps they will reach the Happy Isles “And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.” “Tho’ much is taken, much abides,” he says: made weak by time and fate, they remain strong in will, and the poem ends on this line.

Tennyson wrote the poem in 1833, soon after the sudden death of his close friend Arthur Hallam, and published it in 1842. He later said it expressed his feeling about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life. His hero owes much to Dante, whose Ulysses sails to his death beyond the known world.

The line was carved on the cross raised in Antarctica in memory of Captain Scott and his companions.

Ulysses, last line, 1842

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work