The Boundless Deep: Examining Young Tennyson's Restless Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a torn soul. He produced a poem named The Two Voices, where contrasting facets of his personality debated the merits of suicide. Within this insightful book, the biographer decides to concentrate on the overlooked identity of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century
During 1850 was decisive for Alfred. He published the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for nearly twenty years. As a result, he emerged as both celebrated and wealthy. He entered matrimony, following a long courtship. Previously, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or living by himself in a dilapidated house on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. At that point he took a home where he could host notable visitors. He became the official poet. His existence as a celebrated individual began.
Starting in adolescence he was striking, even glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but good-looking
Family Challenges
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting inclined to emotional swings and sadness. His parent, a hesitant priest, was volatile and very often intoxicated. There was an incident, the facts of which are obscure, that caused the family cook being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a lunatic asylum as a youth and remained there for the rest of his days. Another experienced deep despair and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself experienced bouts of paralysing gloom and what he termed “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is voiced by a madman: he must often have pondered whether he might turn into one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
Even as a youth he was striking, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but handsome. Before he adopted a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could control a room. But, having grown up crowded with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an small space – as an mature individual he sought out privacy, escaping into stillness when in company, vanishing for individual journeys.
Philosophical Anxieties and Crisis of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were raising appalling queries. If the history of living beings had started ages before the arrival of the mankind, then how to believe that the earth had been made for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply formed for us, who reside on a minor world of a common sun.” The new optical instruments and magnifying tools exposed spaces infinitely large and creatures minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s faith, given such evidence, in a deity who had created humanity in his form? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then could the humanity meet the same fate?
Recurrent Themes: Kraken and Friendship
Holmes weaves his account together with a pair of persistent themes. The first he establishes initially – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful student when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief poem establishes themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something vast, unspeakable and tragic, hidden inaccessible of human inquiry, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a master of metre and as the author of symbols in which dreadful unknown is compressed into a few brilliantly evocative words.
The other element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional beast epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is loving and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest verses with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a grateful note in rhyme depicting him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on back, palm and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of pleasure perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent foolishness of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, multiple birds and a tiny creature” constructed their dwellings.
