Sunday Literary-ism

Today’s literary-ism addresses the law from the perspective of the sovereign. In Tennyson’s vision, an elderly Ulysses has long since returned from his travels and grown bored with the workaday life of an island ruler:

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

So, Ulysses decides to leave once again. (Some people think this is a metaphor for his approaching death.) Fortunately, there is someone he can leave behind to keep a (more lawyerly?) eye on things:

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle —
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

After reminding us about some of his great adventures in his earlier life, Ulysses sets off, with some inspiring words for old and young alike:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Read the whole poem. This chopped-up version doesn’t do it justice. Read it aloud.