i know what mood and atmosphere are but i'm having major difficulties in identifying them in the poem, please help ?
Joyce's writing technique is looked at in detail at the site linked below; it should gave the answer to your question. I am going to pull up the original myself and check it out for you also. Be back in a bit :-)
Scratch that answer; you weren't asking about the novel........... so sorry, I'll be back!
The mood is restless, yearning
"I cannot rest from travel"
“I am a part of all that I have met,” he asserts. And it is only when he is traveling that the “margin” of the globe that he has not yet traversed shrink and fade, and cease to goad him.
"Ulysses declares that it is boring to stay in one place, and that to remain stationary is to rust rather than to shine; to stay in one place is to pretend that all there is to life is the simple act of breathing, whereas he knows that in fact life contains much novelty, and he longs to encounter this. His spirit yearns constantly for new experiences that will broaden his horizons; he wishes “to follow knowledge like a sinking star” and forever grow in wisdom and in learning."
"He declares that his goal is to sail onward “beyond the sunset” until his death. Perhaps, he suggests, they may even reach the “Happy Isles,” or the paradise of perpetual summer described in Greek mythology where great heroes like the warrior Achilles were believed to have been taken after their deaths. Although Ulysses and his mariners are not as strong as they were in youth, they are “strong in will” and are sustained by their resolve to push onward relentlessly: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
The poem’s final line, “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” came to serve as a motto for the poet’s Victorian contemporaries: the poem’s hero longs to flee the tedium of daily life “among these barren crags” (line 2) and to enter a mythical dimension “beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars” (lines 60–61); as such, he was a model of individual self-assertion and the Romantic rebellion against bourgeois conformity.
The mood and atmosphere are very similar when looking at this text. Ulysses conveys an unending restlessness, the desire to be more, experience more, and the inability to settle for what you have. The poem's mood is also melancholic and reminiscent.......... a look at days gone by and wish they never had to end.
"How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!"
The warrior longs to continue fighting; he sees the place he is as tedious and peaceful (atmosphere); he is still ambitious "to sail beyond the sunset".
Tennyson wrote this poem "under the sense of loss and that all had gone by, but that still life must be fought out to the end". He was young and grieving over the loss of a friend.
