Read the following lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem "Ulysses" (1842):
18 I am a part of all that I have met;
19 Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
20 Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
21 Forever and forever when I move.
22 How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
23 To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
24 As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
25 Were all too little, and of one to me
26 Little remains; but every hour is saved
27 From that eternal silence, something more,
28 A bringer of new things; and vile it were
29 For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
30 And this gray spirit yearning in desire
31 To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
32 Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
In lines 19–21 ("Yet all . . . I move"), which of the following best describes the primary effect of the syntactical inversion in the clause beginning with "wherethrough"?
- It places immediate emphasis on the visual illumination ("Gleams") before revealing the vast, unseen subject ("that untravelled world").Answer
- BIt suggests a complete break in the speaker's train of thought, separating the "arch" from the "world" at the line break.
- CIt demonstrates the poet's own personal desire to travel to the archaeological ruins of ancient Greece.
- DIt indicates that the "untravelled world" is literally reflecting sunlight off a physical archway.
- EIt serves purely as a decorative use of anastrophe to maintain the iambic pentameter of the blank verse.