The Boundless Deep: Delving into Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a divided spirit. He produced a piece titled The Two Voices, in which dual facets of his personality debated the pros and cons of suicide. In this revealing work, the author decides to concentrate on the more obscure identity of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
The year 1850 proved to be decisive for Alfred. He released the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for close to two decades. As a result, he emerged as both famous and wealthy. He entered matrimony, after a extended relationship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or staying in solitude in a dilapidated cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Now he moved into a residence where he could host notable guests. He assumed the role of the official poet. His life as a renowned figure began.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking
Family Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning prone to moods and melancholy. His parent, a hesitant minister, was volatile and very often intoxicated. Occurred an occurrence, the details of which are obscure, that resulted in the household servant being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and stayed there for his entire existence. Another suffered from deep melancholy and emulated his father into drinking. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself experienced episodes of debilitating gloom and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is told by a madman: he must frequently have pondered whether he could become one himself.
The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking. Even before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could control a room. But, having grown up crowded with his family members – several relatives to an attic room – as an adult he desired solitude, escaping into stillness when in social settings, retreating for lonely walking tours.
Existential Fears and Crisis of Belief
In that period, earth scientists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were raising disturbing queries. If the history of existence had started eons before the emergence of the mankind, then how to hold that the planet had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely created for mankind, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The recent viewing devices and lenses exposed areas infinitely large and creatures infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s faith, given such findings, in a deity who had formed mankind in his own image? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then would the humanity follow suit?
Persistent Motifs: Sea Monster and Friendship
The author binds his account together with a pair of recurrent themes. The first he establishes early on – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the short verse presents ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something enormous, indescribable and tragic, concealed out of reach of investigation, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a expert of metre and as the creator of symbols in which terrible unknown is packed into a few brilliantly suggestive lines.
The second element is the contrast. Where the mythical creature symbolises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is loving and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive verses with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, composed a grateful note in verse depicting him in his flower bed with his tame doves resting all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on arm, palm and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of delight perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent absurdity of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “two owls and a chicken, four larks and a tiny creature” constructed their dwellings.
