“I am a part of all that I have met;”
Looking back at the people and places that made you; reunions, farewells, milestones.
This line comes on
About this line
Tennyson wrote “Ulysses” in the grief-struck weeks after his closest friend, Arthur Hallam, died young. It gives an aging Ulysses a claim rather than a comfort: everything you’ve lived through is still in you — and the horizon keeps receding the moment you move toward it.
Why we carry this line
This quote said to me: we are ALL a part of everyone and everything that crosses our paths. Done. Added the quote.
What happened next
“I am a part of all that I have met” comes early in “Ulysses.” The old king is looking back: every place and person he has known is still in him. Then he turns to what’s left to do. The poem ends on its most famous line: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
That ending traveled farther than Tennyson could have guessed. In January 1913, members of Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition built a nine-foot wooden cross on Observation Hill in Antarctica. It carried the names of Scott and the four men who died with him on the way back from the South Pole. Under the names, they cut Tennyson’s line.
The cross faces the ice shelf where the five men died. It’s now a protected historic monument under the Antarctic Treaty. Tennyson wrote the poem grieving one friend. Eighty years later, it became the epitaph for five men.
Documented source
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