I am a part of all that I have met.

Ulysses is a dramatic monologue: the hero of the Odyssey, home at last in Ithaca, speaks as “an idle king” who metes and doles “Unequal laws unto a savage race”. He cannot rest from travel; he has seen “cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments”. The line sums up that life, and he goes straight on: “Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world”. He resolves to sail once more with his old mariners.

Tennyson wrote the poem in 1833, soon after the sudden death of his closest friend, Arthur Hallam, and later said it expressed his need to go forward and brave the struggle of life. It was published in Poems (1842), and it owes as much to Dante, whose Inferno gives Ulysses a last voyage, as to Homer.

The line is often quoted alone, as a reflection on how every encounter shapes us; the poem ends on the still more famous “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Ulysses, 1842

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work