The Boundless Deep: Examining Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a conflicted soul. He produced a poem titled The Two Voices, wherein two facets of his personality debated the arguments of self-destruction. In this insightful work, the biographer elects to spotlight on the overlooked character of the writer.
A Critical Year: 1850
In the year 1850 was decisive for the poet. He released the significant verse series In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for close to twenty years. Consequently, he emerged as both renowned and wealthy. He wed, 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 residing by himself in a rundown house on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren shores. Now he took a house where he could host notable callers. He was appointed the national poet. His life as a celebrated individual commenced.
From his teens he was commanding, almost glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but good-looking
Family Challenges
The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating inclined to moods and melancholy. His father, a hesitant minister, was irate and frequently inebriated. Transpired an incident, the facts of which are vague, that caused the family cook being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a mental institution as a child and stayed there for life. Another suffered from deep despair and emulated his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself suffered from periods of debilitating despair and what he called “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is told by a madman: he must frequently have pondered whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but good-looking. Before he adopted a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a space. But, being raised in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an attic room – as an mature individual he sought out privacy, withdrawing into quiet when in company, disappearing for individual excursions.
Philosophical Concerns and Crisis of Conviction
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, astronomers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were introducing disturbing inquiries. If the story of life on Earth had started eons before the emergence of the humanity, then how to hold that the earth had been created for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply created for mankind, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun The recent optical instruments and magnifying tools exposed realms infinitely large and organisms infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s faith, in light of such proof, in a deity who had made man in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then could the mankind meet the same fate?
Recurrent Elements: Mythical Beast and Friendship
Holmes weaves his story together with dual persistent elements. The initial he establishes at the beginning – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young scholar when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short verse presents concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something vast, unspeakable and tragic, hidden out of reach of investigation, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of metre and as the creator of images in which dreadful mystery is compressed into a few strikingly suggestive words.
The second theme is the contrast. Where the fictional beast represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is affectionate and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in rhyme depicting him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, palm and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of joy perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant foolishness of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, several songbirds and a tiny creature” constructed their homes.
