The Boundless Deep: Delving into Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a divided spirit. He famously wrote a poem called The Two Voices, in which dual versions of the poet argued the merits of ending his life. Through this insightful volume, the author elects to spotlight on the lesser known character of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: 1850
The year 1850 was decisive for Tennyson. He unveiled the great collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for almost a long period. As a result, he grew both famous and wealthy. He entered matrimony, following a 14‑year engagement. Earlier, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or residing alone in a dilapidated cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Now he moved into a residence where he could receive notable guests. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His career as a renowned figure commenced.
From his teens he was striking, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but handsome
Lineage Challenges
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting prone to emotional swings and sadness. His paternal figure, a unwilling clergyman, was angry and regularly inebriated. There was an occurrence, the facts of which are obscure, that caused the family cook being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a lunatic asylum as a child and stayed there for life. Another suffered from deep melancholy and followed his father into addiction. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of overwhelming despair and what he termed “strange episodes”. His work Maud is told by a lunatic: he must often have questioned whether he was one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost glamorous. He was very tall, messy but good-looking. Even before he adopted a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a gathering. But, being raised in close quarters with his siblings – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an adult he craved solitude, retreating into silence when in company, vanishing for solitary walking tours.
Existential Fears and Turmoil of Belief
In that period, earth scientists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were introducing appalling inquiries. If the history of living beings had begun millions of years before the appearance of the human race, then how to hold that the planet had been created for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply made for humanity, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The modern optical instruments and lenses revealed areas immensely huge and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s religion, considering such findings, in a God who had formed mankind in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then might the mankind meet the same fate?
Repeating Themes: Sea Monster and Bond
The biographer binds his narrative together with a pair of persistent motifs. The primary he establishes at the beginning – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief verse introduces themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something enormous, unutterable and sad, submerged inaccessible of human inquiry, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of verse and as the creator of images in which terrible unknown is compressed into a few brilliantly suggestive lines.
The additional theme is the contrast. Where the imaginary sea monster represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is fond and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a appreciation message in poetry depicting him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on shoulder, wrist and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of pleasure nicely suited to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent absurdity of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the old man with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, four larks and a wren” built their nests.
