Tithonus

This Tithonus, the husband of Aurora, the Goddess of the Dawn, was the father of her son, the dark-skinned prince Memnon of Ethiopia who was killed at Troy, fighting for the Trojans.

Tithonus himself had a strange fate.

Chaucer was around fifty when “The Merchant’s Tale” was conceived; Shakespeare either forty-one or forty-two when he wrote “King Lear,” Swift fifty-five or so when gleefully depicting the immortal but ailing Struldbruggs, and Tennyson a mere twenty-four when he began “Tithonus” and completed “Ulysses,” his great anthem to an aging but “hungry heart.”

When the Greek goddess Eos asked the gods to grant her mortal lover Tithonus eternal life, she neglected to add a necessary codicil to the celestial contract — that he have eternal youth as well.

So begins Tennyson’s haunting poem “Tithonus,” a meditation on death as part of the natural order of things.