Uncharted Depths: Delving into Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself was known as a divided soul. He famously wrote a poem called The Two Voices, where two facets of the poet debated the arguments of ending his life. In this illuminating work, the biographer chooses to focus on the lesser known character of the poet.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 became pivotal for Tennyson. He unveiled the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had worked for nearly two decades. Therefore, he emerged as both celebrated and prosperous. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a long relationship. Earlier, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or residing in solitude in a ramshackle house on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. At that point he acquired a home where he could entertain notable visitors. He was appointed the national poet. His career as a Great Man started.
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking
Ancestral Turmoil
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating prone to temperament and depression. His paternal figure, a reluctant minister, was volatile and frequently intoxicated. Transpired an occurrence, the facts of which are obscure, that led to the family cook being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a mental institution as a child and lived there for the rest of his days. Another experienced profound despair and copied his father into addiction. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of debilitating sadness and what he called “strange episodes”. His Maud is narrated by a madman: he must often have wondered whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking. Before he adopted a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could control a room. But, being raised crowded with his family members – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he sought out solitude, withdrawing into quiet when in company, disappearing for solitary excursions.
Existential Concerns and Crisis of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, star gazers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were raising appalling questions. If the timeline of living beings had begun ages before the appearance of the human race, then how to believe that the earth had been made for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely formed for humanity, who live on a minor world of a common sun.” The modern telescopes and lenses exposed realms vast beyond measure and beings infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s faith, considering such evidence, in a God who had created mankind in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then would the mankind do so too?
Recurrent Themes: Sea Monster and Bond
The biographer weaves his narrative together with a pair of recurrent motifs. The first he establishes at the beginning – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young scholar when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line sonnet introduces themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something vast, indescribable and mournful, submerged inaccessible of human inquiry, anticipates the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of verse and as the originator of symbols in which terrible mystery is compressed into a few strikingly evocative phrases.
The additional motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional sea monster epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is loving and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a thank-you letter in rhyme portraying him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on back, hand and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of joy perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of hedonism – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant foolishness of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, multiple birds and a small bird” made their dwellings.
