The Boundless Deep: Delving into Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a conflicted spirit. He even composed a piece called The Two Voices, where dual versions of the poet debated the pros and cons of ending his life. Within this insightful work, the biographer decides to concentrate on the more obscure character of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 became decisive for the poet. He published the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for almost twenty years. Therefore, he emerged as both famous and rich. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a extended engagement. Earlier, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his family members, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or staying in solitude in a rundown dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. At that point he acquired a home where he could host notable callers. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His career as a Great Man started.
From his teens he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking
Ancestral Challenges
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting susceptible to moods and depression. His parent, a hesitant minister, was angry and very often drunk. Transpired an incident, the particulars of which are unclear, that led to the family cook being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a lunatic asylum as a boy and lived there for life. Another suffered from severe despair and emulated his father into addiction. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself experienced episodes of overwhelming gloom and what he called “bizarre fits”. His Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must often have questioned whether he might turn into one personally.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but handsome. Even before he began to wear a dark cloak and headwear, he could command a space. But, maturing crowded with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an small space – as an mature individual he craved isolation, retreating into stillness when in company, disappearing for lonely excursions.
Deep Fears and Crisis of Belief
During his era, earth scientists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were posing frightening queries. If the history of existence had commenced ages before the emergence of the mankind, then how to maintain that the earth had been formed for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely created for us, who reside on a minor world of a third-rate sun The modern optical instruments and magnifying tools uncovered areas infinitely large and organisms minutely tiny: how to keep one’s belief, considering such proof, in a divine being who had formed man in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then could the human race do so too?
Repeating Themes: Kraken and Bond
The biographer weaves his account together with a pair of recurring motifs. The first he introduces initially – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the brief poem introduces concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something immense, unutterable and sad, concealed inaccessible of human inquiry, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a master of rhythm and as the author of symbols in which dreadful unknown is condensed into a few dazzlingly indicative lines.
The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional sea monster symbolises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is fond and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive verses with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a grateful note in rhyme portraying him in his rose garden with his tame doves perching all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on back, palm and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of joy nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant absurdity of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the old man with a facial hair in which “two owls and a hen, multiple birds and a tiny creature” built their dwellings.
