The Sirens and Ulysses The Sirens and Ulysses The Sirens and Ulysses is a large oil painting on canvas by the English artist William Etty, first exhibited in 1837. It depicts the scene from Homer's "Odyssey" in which Ulysses (Odysseus) resists the bewitching song of the Sirens by having his ship's crew tie him up, while they are ordered to block their own ears to prevent themselves from hearing the song. While traditionally the Sirens had been depicted as human–animal chimeras, Etty portrayed them as naked young women, on an island strewn with decaying corpses. The painting divided opinion at the time of its
Ulysses (poem) the argument that ideology is ahistorical, finding that Tennyson's poem "comes before an ideological construction for which it nonetheless makes people nostalgic". In a 1929 essay, T. S. Eliot called "Ulysses" a "perfect poem". An analogue of Ulysses is found in Eliot's "Gerontion" (1920). Both poems are narrated by an aged man contemplating life's end. An excerpt from "Gerontion" reads as an ironic comment on the introductory lines of "Ulysses": <poem> </poem> The Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) stated that his long lyric poem "L'ultimo viaggio" was an attempt to reconcile the portrayals of Ulysses in Dante and Tennyson with