The Boundless Deep: Delving into Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a divided individual. He even composed a piece named The Two Voices, wherein dual versions of the poet debated the arguments of self-destruction. Through this illuminating work, the biographer decides to concentrate on the more obscure identity of the poet.
A Defining Year: 1850
During 1850 proved to be pivotal for Tennyson. He released the great poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had worked for close to a long period. Consequently, he became both renowned and wealthy. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a 14‑year courtship. Before that, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or living in solitude in a rundown cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. At that point he moved into a home where he could receive distinguished callers. He became the official poet. His life as a Great Man commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost glamorous. He was very tall, disheveled but handsome
Lineage Struggles
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting inclined to temperament and melancholy. His paternal figure, a hesitant priest, was volatile and frequently intoxicated. Transpired an incident, the facts of which are obscure, that caused the family cook being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a boy and stayed there for his entire existence. Another endured severe depression and copied his father into alcoholism. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself endured episodes of paralysing sadness and what he termed “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must regularly have questioned whether he could become one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even charismatic. He was of great height, messy but handsome. Before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a gathering. But, having grown up crowded with his siblings – multiple siblings to an small space – as an grown man he desired privacy, retreating into quiet when in company, disappearing for individual journeys.
Deep Anxieties and Crisis of Belief
During his era, rock experts, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Darwin about the origin of species, were posing frightening queries. If the story of existence had started millions of years before the appearance of the mankind, then how to hold that the planet had been made for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply made for mankind, who inhabit a minor world of a common sun.” The recent optical instruments and magnifying tools revealed realms infinitely large and organisms minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s religion, given such evidence, in a God who had created humanity in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then might the humanity meet the same fate?
Persistent Elements: Sea Monster and Companionship
Holmes binds his narrative together with a pair of recurrent motifs. The initial he establishes early on – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the short poem establishes ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something enormous, unutterable and sad, concealed out of reach of investigation, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of verse and as the creator of symbols in which terrible unknown is compressed into a few dazzlingly suggestive phrases.
The additional theme is the counterpart. Where the fictional creature epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is fond and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest verses with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a appreciation message in rhyme depicting him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on back, palm and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of pleasure perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s great celebration of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent nonsense of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the old man with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, four larks and a wren” built their homes.
