Uncharted Depths: Delving into Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a divided individual. He even composed a poem named The Two Voices, wherein contrasting versions of his personality debated the merits of ending his life. In this revealing book, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the more obscure identity of the poet.
A Critical Year: 1850
The year 1850 proved to be decisive for the poet. He published the great poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for close to two decades. As a result, he emerged as both famous and wealthy. He got married, following a long relationship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or staying alone in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. Now he acquired a house where he could receive notable guests. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His existence as a celebrated individual started.
Even as a youth he was imposing, even glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome
Family Struggles
His family, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting susceptible to temperament and sadness. His paternal figure, a hesitant minister, was angry and very often intoxicated. There was an event, the particulars of which are unclear, that resulted in the family cook being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a mental institution as a boy and remained there for the rest of his days. Another endured deep depression and copied his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself endured episodes of paralysing gloom and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His work Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must often have wondered whether he was one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson
Even as a youth he was striking, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but handsome. Before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could control a gathering. But, maturing crowded with his siblings – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an adult he desired solitude, withdrawing into silence when in groups, disappearing for lonely excursions.
Existential Fears and Upheaval of Faith
During his era, rock experts, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the origin of species, were introducing frightening questions. If the history of life on Earth had started eons before the appearance of the mankind, then how to maintain that the earth had been created for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was only created for humanity, who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun The recent telescopes and magnifying tools revealed areas infinitely large and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s belief, in light of such evidence, in a God who had made humanity in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the humanity follow suit?
Recurrent Themes: Sea Monster and Bond
The author weaves his narrative together with a pair of recurrent motifs. The initial he presents early on – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young student when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line verse presents themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something enormous, unspeakable and mournful, concealed beyond reach of human understanding, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of rhythm and as the author of metaphors in which awful unknown is compressed into a few brilliantly indicative phrases.
The second motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional beast epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is loving and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a grateful note in rhyme depicting him in his flower bed with his tame doves sitting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, palm and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of joy nicely suited to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent absurdity of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, multiple birds and a small bird” made their homes.
