The Boundless Deep: Delving into Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a divided soul. He even composed a verse called The Two Voices, wherein dual facets of himself debated the merits of self-destruction. Through this revealing volume, the biographer decides to concentrate on the more obscure character of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: 1850
During 1850 was decisive for Alfred. He published the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had worked for almost a long period. Therefore, he grew both famous and wealthy. He wed, after a extended courtship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his family members, or lodging with male acquaintances in London, or living alone in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. At that point he took a house where he could host prominent guests. He was appointed the national poet. His career as a Great Man began.
From his teens he was commanding, almost glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive
Ancestral Challenges
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning inclined to temperament and depression. His paternal figure, a hesitant clergyman, was irate and very often inebriated. Transpired an event, the facts of which are unclear, that caused the family cook being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a child and remained there for life. Another suffered from deep depression and followed his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of paralysing despair and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is told by a madman: he must regularly have questioned whether he was one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on magnetic. He was very tall, messy but good-looking. Before he started wearing a dark cloak and headwear, he could dominate a room. But, being raised in close quarters with his siblings – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an mature individual he craved isolation, retreating into quiet when in groups, retreating for solitary excursions.
Philosophical Concerns and Turmoil of Belief
In that period, geologists, celestial observers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the origin of species, were introducing disturbing inquiries. If the story of life on Earth had started millions of years before the appearance of the human race, then how to hold that the world had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was only made for us, who live on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The new optical instruments and magnifying tools exposed areas vast beyond measure and beings minutely tiny: how to keep one’s belief, considering such proof, in a divine being who had created mankind in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then would the humanity meet the same fate?
Persistent Elements: Sea Monster and Friendship
Holmes binds his account together with dual recurring elements. The primary he presents early on – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young student when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line sonnet establishes ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, hidden beyond reach of investigation, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of metre and as the originator of symbols in which dreadful unknown is condensed into a few strikingly suggestive phrases.
The second motif is the contrast. Where the mythical sea monster epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is loving and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a thank-you letter in rhyme portraying him in his garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on shoulder, wrist and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of pleasure nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb absurdity of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, four larks and a small bird” constructed their dwellings.
