The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Restless Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a conflicted individual. He famously wrote a verse named The Two Voices, in which dual facets of the poet argued the arguments of suicide. Through this illuminating work, the author decides to concentrate on the overlooked persona of the poet.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 became crucial for Tennyson. He released the great collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for close to twenty years. Therefore, he emerged as both celebrated and rich. He got married, after a extended engagement. Before that, he had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or residing by himself in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren shores. Now he moved into a house where he could entertain prominent visitors. He assumed the role of the national poet. His existence as a celebrated individual began.
From his teens he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome
Family Challenges
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting prone to moods and depression. His paternal figure, a unwilling clergyman, was angry and frequently inebriated. Transpired an occurrence, the particulars of which are vague, that caused the domestic worker being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a lunatic asylum as a child and remained there for his entire existence. Another experienced profound despair and followed his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself experienced periods of paralysing gloom and what he called “strange episodes”. His Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must frequently have pondered whether he could become one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome. Prior to he adopted a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a gathering. But, being raised in close quarters with his siblings – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he craved solitude, escaping into silence when in social settings, disappearing for individual journeys.
Existential Anxieties and Crisis of Conviction
In that period, geologists, astronomers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with Darwin about the origin of species, were posing frightening queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had started ages before the appearance of the human race, then how to hold that the earth had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply formed for humanity, who reside on a minor world of a ordinary star The new viewing devices and microscopes exposed areas immensely huge and organisms infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s belief, in light of such proof, in a God who had formed mankind in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then would the human race follow suit?
Recurrent Themes: Kraken and Friendship
The biographer binds his account together with a pair of recurrent elements. The first he introduces at the beginning – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the short verse introduces ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something vast, unspeakable and sad, hidden beyond reach of investigation, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a master of rhythm and as the creator of symbols in which terrible unknown is packed into a few dazzlingly suggestive words.
The other theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional creature represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is fond and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a appreciation message in poetry describing him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on back, wrist and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an image of delight perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s great praise of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant absurdity of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a hen, several songbirds and a small bird” built their dwellings.
