"There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail"

Image from appstate.edu

The words are from Tennyson's poem "Ulysses." When I wrote them out in watercolour paint and pinned them on my bedroom wall at seventeen, I understood them as metaphor for life beckoning. I had no clear idea who Ulysses was, and thought of Troy as a mythical location, lying somewhere in that hazy country, the past.

I little dreamed that one day I would walk over the vast ruins of that ancient many-layered city with my husband, in his own country. Nor did I imagine that one day our daughter, then the same age I was when I read the poem in school, would take part in a high school theatre production of The Trojan Women.

I'd never have imagined how profoundly that production would move me. Watching two young casts perform the ancient play by Euripides, my face was soaked with tears both times. How could I have foreseen my daughter at seventeen as a convincing Cassandra, or how well her friends would portray roles so far beyond their innocent ken. It was a revelation to see a seventeen-year-old live the role of the widowed queen Hecuba, and to watch a sixteen-year-old Andromache as a bereaved wife and mother who must face such appalling tragedy.

My initial departure from that port referred to by the wandering Ulysses portrayed in Tennyson's poem has taken me far, and part of the distance I've covered has returned me to a deeper understanding of Ulysses and Troy, and all those words imply.

A mere hundred years ago, the Irish bard James Joyce created a mythical Ilium in Dublin, his adventurer Bloom the modern Ulysses. And still, a century later, the horizon beckons as the wind still puffs out the sails.