Tennyson’s poem Ulysses is about Ulysses becoming restless again after returning home, and setting out on another voyage: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses
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
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart…
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It wasn’t until a while ago, when I read Dante’s Commedia, that I realized that this was probably inspired by Dante’s depiction of Ulysses in the Inferno:
“not fondness for my son, nor reverence
for my aged father, nor Penelope’s claim
to the joys of love, could drive out of my mind
the lust to experience the far-flung world
and the failings and felicities of mankind.
I put out on the high and open sea
with a single ship and only those few souls
who stayed true when the rest deserted me…
I and my men were stiff and slow with age
when we sailed at last into the narrow pass
where, warning all men back from further voyage
Hercules’ pillars rose upon our sight…
‘Shipmates,’ I said, ‘who through a hundred thousand
perils have reached the West, do not deny
to the brief remaing watch our senses stand
experience of the world beyond the sun.
Greeks! You were not born to live like brutes,
but to press onward toward manhood and recognition!’
With this brief exhortation I made my crew
so eager for the voyage I could hardly
have held them back from it when I was through;
and turning our stern toward morning, our bow toward night,
we bore southwest out of the world of man;
we made wings of our oars for our fool’s flight.
That night we raised the other pole ahead
with all its stars, and ours had so declined
it did not rise out of its ocean bed.
Five times since we had dipped our bending oars
beyond the world, the light beneath the moon
had waxed and waned, when dead upon our course
we sighted, dark in space, a peak so tall
I doubted any man had seen the like.
Our cheers were hardly sounded, when a squall
broke hard upon our bow from the new land:
three times it sucked the ship and the sea about
as it pleased Another to order and command.
At the fourth, the poop rose and the bow went down
till the sea closed over us and the light was gone.”
In the cosmology of the Commedia, all the world’s regular continents are in the northern hemisphere, while the only land in the southern hemisphere is the mountain of Purgatory, at the top of which is the Garden of Eden. Ulysses seeks to sail there, comes within sight of the mountain (evoking for me the image of the Númenorean fleet arriving offshore of Valinor and seeing Taniquetil), and his ship is then swallowed by a great wave.
