Interpretations
The first version of "Tithonus" was one of four poems that also included "Morte d'Arthur", "Ulysses", and "Tiresias" which were written by Tennyson following the death of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. His death greatly influenced much of Tennyson’s later poetry. According to critic Mary Donahue, “It is not that anything so obvious and simple as the identification of Eos with Hallam is possible or that the emotional relationship between Tennyson and Hallam is wholly clarified by ‘Tithonus’ But it is clear that, in choosing the mask of Tithonus, Tennyson reached out to two of the most basic symbols, those of love between man and woman and the frustration of love by age, to express the peculiar nature of his own emotional injury.” Victorian scholar Matthew Reynolds wrote, “Grieving for Arthur Hallam, Tennyson wrote poems which describe what they themselves possess: a life unusually, but not eternally, prolonged through time.”
Tithonus’s suffering is a reminder of the futility of attempting to “pass beyond the goal of ordinance” (30). It is a poignant expression of the inevitability of death and of the necessity of accepting it as such. Tithonus has to bear the consequences of varying from “the kindly race of men” (29). Though he succeeds in defying death, his youth and beauty desert him in his old age. He can only ask for release. But death does not come to him later even when he begs for it. He is destined to live forever as a “white-haired shadow” (8) and forever roam “the ever-silent spaces of the East” (9). In being immortal, Tithonus ceases to be himself, sacrifices his mortal identity.
Tennyson described "Tithonus" in a letter as “a pendent to the "Ulysses" in my former volumes.” Tithonus’s character offers a strong contrast to that of Ulysses. The two poems are matched and opposed as the utterances of Greek and Trojan, victor and vanquished, hero and victim. According to critic William E. Cain, "Tithonus has discovered the curse of fulfillment, of having his carelessly worded wish come true. He lives where no man ought to live, on the other side of the horizon, the other side of the border that Ulysses could only plan to cross.
According to Victorian scholar A. A. Markley, "Tithonus" offers a viewpoint opposite to that of "Ulysses" on the theme of the acceptance of death. He writes that “while 'Ulysses' explores the human spirit that refuses to accept death, 'Tithonus' explores the human acceptance of the inevitability, and even the appropriateness, of death as the end of the life cycle. The two poems offer two extreme views of facing death, each one which balances the other when they are read together− clearly one of Tennyson’s original intentions when he first drafted them in 1833. Nevertheless, reading 'Tithonus' purely as a pendant to 'Ulysses' has led to unnecessarily reductive readings of both poems.”
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