The Boundless Deep: Delving into Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a conflicted individual. He famously wrote a verse titled The Two Voices, wherein two aspects of himself argued the arguments of self-destruction. Through this illuminating work, the author chooses to focus on the more obscure character of the writer.
A Critical Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 became decisive for Tennyson. He unveiled the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had worked for close to a long period. Consequently, he emerged as both celebrated and rich. He got married, following a 14‑year courtship. Previously, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or staying in solitude in a dilapidated house on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. Then he moved into a home where he could host notable guests. He was appointed the national poet. His life as a Great Man began.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost charismatic. He was very tall, messy but handsome
Lineage Struggles
His family, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning susceptible to emotional swings and depression. His paternal figure, a unwilling minister, was volatile and very often intoxicated. Transpired an incident, the particulars of which are obscure, that caused the family cook being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a mental institution as a child and stayed there for life. Another endured deep depression and copied his father into addiction. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself experienced bouts of paralysing sadness and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is told by a lunatic: he must frequently have pondered whether he might turn into one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was striking, even charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but handsome. Before he began to wear a dark cloak and headwear, he could control a room. But, maturing crowded with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an grown man he desired privacy, withdrawing into silence when in social settings, retreating for lonely excursions.
Existential Fears and Upheaval of Faith
In that period, earth scientists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were posing disturbing inquiries. If the story of life on Earth had commenced millions of years before the arrival of the human race, then how to believe that the world had been made for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply made for humanity, who reside on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun The new telescopes and microscopes revealed realms infinitely large and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s faith, in light of such proof, in a God who had formed man in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then might the human race follow suit?
Persistent Elements: Sea Monster and Bond
Holmes ties his story together with dual recurring themes. The primary he presents early on – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young student when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the short poem introduces ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something vast, unspeakable and tragic, concealed inaccessible of investigation, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a master of metre and as the originator of metaphors in which awful unknown is condensed into a few strikingly suggestive phrases.
The second element is the counterpart. Where the fictional beast symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is loving and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a thank-you letter in poetry depicting him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on arm, palm and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of joy excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s notable praise of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent nonsense of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren” made their nests.
