Uncharted Depths: Examining Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a torn individual. He even composed a poem called The Two Voices, in which dual versions of the poet argued the pros and cons of suicide. In this insightful volume, the author decides to concentrate on the more obscure identity of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 became decisive for the poet. He unveiled the great collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for almost a long period. Consequently, he became both renowned and prosperous. He got married, subsequent to a long engagement. Previously, he had been residing in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or lodging with male acquaintances in London, or living in solitude in a ramshackle house on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. At that point he took a home where he could receive prominent guests. He was appointed the national poet. His existence as a renowned figure commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was striking, almost glamorous. He was very tall, messy but good-looking
Ancestral Struggles
His family, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, indicating prone to emotional swings and depression. His father, a hesitant clergyman, was volatile and very often drunk. Transpired an event, the particulars of which are unclear, that caused the household servant being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and remained there for his entire existence. Another experienced severe depression and followed his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself endured episodes of overwhelming sadness and what he termed “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is told by a madman: he must regularly have pondered whether he could become one in his own right.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was imposing, almost charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but good-looking. Even before he started wearing a dark cloak and headwear, he could command a gathering. But, being raised crowded with his siblings – several relatives to an attic room – as an mature individual he craved solitude, escaping into quiet when in company, disappearing for individual excursions.
Deep Fears and Upheaval of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the origin of species, were raising appalling inquiries. If the history of life on Earth had commenced eons before the arrival of the mankind, then how to hold that the world had been made for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only created for us, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun The recent viewing devices and lenses uncovered spaces infinitely large and beings tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s faith, given such evidence, in a divine being who had formed humanity in his form? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then might the mankind do so too?
Recurrent Motifs: Kraken and Friendship
The biographer weaves his narrative together with dual persistent themes. The primary he establishes at the beginning – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “ancient legends, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line poem presents concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something vast, unspeakable and mournful, submerged out of reach of investigation, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of verse and as the creator of images in which dreadful mystery is compressed into a few strikingly evocative words.
The second theme is the counterpart. Where the fictional creature epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, conjures all that is affectionate and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a grateful note in poetry describing him in his flower bed with his pet birds perching all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on arm, hand and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of delight perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent nonsense of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the old man with a whiskers in which “two owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a small bird” constructed their nests.
