The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a conflicted individual. He even composed a piece called The Two Voices, in which dual versions of himself argued the merits of self-destruction. Through this revealing work, the author elects to spotlight on the lesser known character of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
During 1850 became crucial for the poet. He unveiled the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for nearly a long period. Therefore, he became both renowned and rich. He wed, subsequent to a long relationship. Previously, he had been living in leased properties with his family members, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or residing in solitude in a rundown dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren shores. At that point he acquired a home where he could host prominent visitors. He was appointed poet laureate. His life as a Great Man commenced.
Even as a youth he was striking, even magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking
Ancestral Challenges
The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning inclined to temperament and sadness. His father, a unwilling minister, was irate and regularly drunk. Transpired an event, the facts of which are obscure, that resulted in the family cook being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a mental institution as a youth and stayed there for life. Another suffered from deep depression and emulated his father into drinking. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself endured episodes of debilitating sadness and what he termed “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must often have questioned whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was imposing, almost charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking. Before he started wearing a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a room. But, being raised in close quarters with his siblings – several relatives to an attic room – as an grown man he desired solitude, retreating into quiet when in company, retreating for individual excursions.
Existential Concerns and Crisis of Conviction
In that period, geologists, star gazers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the evolution, were posing frightening queries. If the timeline of existence had started millions of years before the appearance of the mankind, then how to believe that the world had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply formed for humanity, who reside on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The modern viewing devices and microscopes exposed spaces infinitely large and beings tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s religion, in light of such evidence, in a deity who had created man in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then might the humanity meet the same fate?
Repeating Elements: Kraken and Friendship
The biographer ties his narrative together with dual recurrent themes. The first he introduces initially – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the brief verse introduces themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something enormous, indescribable and mournful, hidden out of reach of human understanding, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of metre and as the originator of symbols in which awful enigma is condensed into a few brilliantly evocative phrases.
The additional element is the counterpart. Where the imaginary beast represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is fond and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest lines with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a appreciation message in verse portraying him in his rose garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on back, palm and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of joy excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent foolishness of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s poem about the old man with a beard in which “two owls and a hen, multiple birds and a tiny creature” made their dwellings.
