The Boundless Deep: Examining Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a divided individual. He produced a piece titled The Two Voices, where two facets of his personality debated the arguments of suicide. Through this insightful work, the biographer chooses to focus on the more obscure character of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 proved to be pivotal for Alfred. He published the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for nearly twenty years. As a result, he emerged as both famous and wealthy. He got married, after a long engagement. Previously, he had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or residing in solitude in a rundown house on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Then he acquired a residence where he could host prominent callers. He was appointed poet laureate. His existence as a renowned figure began.
From his teens he was imposing, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive
Family Turmoil
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting susceptible to moods and melancholy. His paternal figure, a reluctant clergyman, was irate and very often intoxicated. Transpired an incident, the particulars of which are unclear, that led to the domestic worker being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a youth and remained there for the rest of his days. Another experienced deep despair and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself endured bouts of debilitating gloom and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is told by a insane person: he must frequently have wondered whether he was one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost glamorous. He was very tall, disheveled but handsome. Before he adopted a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could control a space. But, maturing crowded with his siblings – three brothers to an small space – as an grown man he sought out isolation, retreating into quiet when in company, retreating for individual journeys.
Deep Anxieties and Upheaval of Faith
During his era, geologists, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the evolution, were raising disturbing questions. If the story of living beings had started eons before the arrival of the humanity, then how to hold that the planet had been created for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply formed for mankind, who live on a minor world of a common sun.” The new telescopes and microscopes revealed realms immensely huge and organisms infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s belief, considering such evidence, in a deity who had formed mankind in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then would the human race do so too?
Persistent Motifs: Mythical Beast and Bond
The biographer weaves his account together with a pair of recurrent motifs. The primary he presents initially – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful student when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief sonnet introduces concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, submerged beyond reach of investigation, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of rhythm and as the creator of images in which dreadful unknown is packed into a few dazzlingly indicative lines.
The other motif is the counterpart. Where the mythical sea monster represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine 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 side of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive lines with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a grateful note in verse depicting him in his flower bed with his pet birds perching all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, palm and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of pleasure nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s notable praise of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant absurdity of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “two owls and a chicken, four larks and a small bird” built their nests.