What are techniques used to make the poem "Ulysses" more effective? Like assonance and alliteration.

Tennyson's "" is a defiant poem
about growing old. The eponymous speaker longs for the adventures of his youth and refuses to
slow down for old age.

In the second line, the speaker references "this
still hearth," which can be read as a symbol for the stillness of his old age. A hearth is
meant to be home to a fire, but the fact that there is no fireand thus the hearth is
stillsymbolizes how there is at this point no passion or life in his old age. He wants the fires
to burn again, meaning essentially that he longs to once more feel the passion and vitality of
youth.

A bit later in the poem, the speaker recalls how once he used to roam
across the world with "a hungry heart." The language technique here is . The speaker
personifies his heart as hungry to help the reader understand how he was hungry for passion in
his youth so that he had to constantly satiate that hunger with adventure. This for him was a
necessity, a basic need, just as eating food to satiate hunger is a basic need for us. The
phrase "hungry heart" is also alliterated, which helps it to stand out in the line and
emphasize its significance.

Further on in the poem, the speaker uses awhen he
describes the inactivity of old age as "rust unburnish'd." This metaphor helps to
create a vivid image of something that has been forgotten and that perhaps is no loner cared for
or no longer of much use. This is how the speaker feels in his old age.

Towards the end of the first stanza, the speaker declares that he wants again to
"follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought." In
this quotation, Tennyson uses ato compare his desire to travel and discover new things to a star
that falls beyond the horizon. It's a romantic image and captures rather well the extent and
scale of the ambitions and desires that the speaker still has.

In the final
two lines of the poem, there is assonance with the repeated vowel sound in "weak,"
"seek," and "yield." The poem ends with a defiant pledge "not to
yield" to old age, with "yield" being the final word of the poem. The fact that
"yield" has the same strong vowel sound as "weak" and "seek"
creates a sense of finality, or closure, much like a rhymingsignals the end or close of a scene
in a Shakespearean play. The assonance means that emphasis is placed on the final word,
re-enforcing the sentiment behind the phrase. The speaker will not "yield" to old age
but will venture onwards and, as he says earlier in the poem, "sail beyond the
sunset."