my long awaited copy of the strings are false came today. i really like that title. and that's about the good news.

and i'm struggling on trying to make a coherent set of notes for my engl class which must include in memoriam and childe rolande to the dark tower came, both of which are - i feel - difficult. one's a shaggy beast and the other is uninterpretable - at least not in a satisfying way. and ulysses too, which is - difficult. you wouldn't think so, but it has always been a very difficult poem for me. as a child growing up in the empire - i say empire without any ironies and with all its connotations - notice how tennyson is most popular today - not in england nor the united states, but in those parts of the world that had once belonged to the empire - the valour of victorian england – the empire on which the sun never set. i have had those lines quoted at me by my dad since i was *indicate* this tall. and they were magnificent lines. "one equal temper of heroic hearts!" "to strive to seek to find and not to yield!"

but in college i found robert langbaum cautioning against reading for the "strenousness", and who taught me to hear “the cadences of tithonus and lotos eaters” in the poem. and with tennyson – nowadays i only feel sympathetic - weariness. and is tennyson's ulysses a renaissance columbus? daniel albright points out you could certainly say that tennyson's later poem, columbus, simply resurrects ulysses. nohrnberg says this ought to make us consider dante. but langbaum precisely underlines tennyson's ulysses' difference from dante’s ulysses – to langbaum, this ulysses is not over-presumptuous, is someone who already holds out death as the final goal, is a story of a man of diminished strength. and herbert tucker reads it as – a speech to phantom mariners. and paul cantor - even more sinisterly - as sacrificial mariners. and taken with dante, and prufrock, nohrnberg reads the poem as being about - metaphor. and i feel as if - all of these readings are right but also wrong. i want to sit down and try to synthesise them and write my class a really good set of notes. but not doing well.