The first thing we ask for is the connection, the inner thread which joins these Books together. It was stated that Polyphemus was the negation of the institutional world, he was individualistic, he belonged to neither Family nor State. No laws, no councils, no civil polity; he is a huge man of violence, hostile specially to man's social life. Circe on the contrary, is the woman hostile to woman's domestic world, the Family, first of all; she is the grand enchantress, representing the power and seductiveness of the senses; she is the enemy of what we call morals. To be sure, we shall find in her something more, whereof the full unfolding will be given hereafter.
Ulysses is the one who is to meet those negative forces and put them down. His companions give him special trouble in the present Book, they seem to represent the weaker phases of man, possibly of Ulysses himself. Already he has suppressed Polyphemus, or the institutional negation; now he is to subordinate Circe or the moral negation. The latter is a woman because she must have sensuous beauty and all the charm of passionate enticement; the former is a man because he must show strength and violence rather than the allurement of pleasure.
Nor should we forget that these forms are in Ulysses himself, and were really generated out of his Trojan life; that spirit of his, shown at the start by the attack on the Ciconians, has all these phases in its process. He is traveling through an Inferno, seeing its entire demonic brood, which he has begotten, and which he has to fight and subject. At the same time these fantastic shapes are typical, and shadow forth the universal experience of man, belonging to all countries and all ages.
As already stated, there are three different localities to which Ulysses is brought. Three islands, bounded, yet in a boundless sea, through which he moves on his ships; such is the outermost setting of nature, suggestive of much. No tempest occurs in this Book; the stress is upon the three fixed places in the unfixed aqueous element.
I. First is the island where dwells Æolus with his Family; hither Ulysses comes after putting down Polyphemus who was hostile to domestic life. In this spot the bag of winds is given into the possession of the navigator, whose companions, however, release them, and he is driven to the starting-point, with the winds at large. Æolus refuses to receive him the second time.
II. Next is the city of the Læstrigonians, where is a civil life, a State, to which Ulysses can come after subjecting the Cyclops, who had no polity of the sort. But the State is verily a giant, a cannibal to him now, with all the winds loose. Hence he has to flee for his life. Whither now does he go?
III. Not to Penelope and Ithaca, but to Circe, and her isle. She is the form which next rises before Ulysses, banished from the domestic world of Æolus, and fleeing from the civil life of the Læstrigonians.
We shall try to bring the threads of connection to light, for it is our emphatic opinion that these three islands with their shapes are spiritually bound and wound together. Still further, they reach back and interlink with the forms of the previous Book, which furnish antecedent stages of the grand total movement of Fairyland. Separated in image are these islands and their inhabitants, but they have to be united in thought. Not a mere accident is the sequence, but a necessity, a strict evolution. The work here, according our best belief, is organic, and the reader must not rest contented with his understanding of it, till he moves with the poet from place to place by the interior path of the spirit.
I.
The first fact about the Æolian Isle is that it was afloat in the waters of the sea, as Delos and other islands of antiquity were reported to be. Not stationary then; the king of it, Æolus, has a name which indicates a changeable nature, veering about like the winds, of which he is king. The second fact pertaining to this Isle is that a wall of brass encircles it not to be broken through; "and the cliff runs up sheer from the sea." Manifestly two opposite ideas are suggested in this description: the fixed and the movable; the island within itself is bound fast, and cannot be driven asunder; yet it floats in the most unstable of elements, in the sea and winds. Such is the physical environment, clearly mirroring the meaning. Something permanent in the midst of all that is mutable we may expect to find here.