The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself was known as a divided individual. He produced a poem named The Two Voices, in which contrasting aspects of the poet debated the pros and cons of ending his life. In this illuminating volume, the author decides to concentrate on the lesser known persona of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 was decisive for Alfred. He released the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for close to twenty years. Consequently, he grew both celebrated and wealthy. He entered matrimony, after a 14‑year courtship. Previously, he had been residing in rented homes with his relatives, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or staying alone in a rundown cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Then he moved into a house where he could receive distinguished guests. He was appointed the national poet. His life as a celebrated individual commenced.
From his teens he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive
Lineage Turmoil
His family, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating prone to temperament and sadness. His father, a hesitant clergyman, was angry and very often drunk. Occurred an event, the facts of which are vague, that led to the family cook being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a lunatic asylum as a boy and lived there for his entire existence. Another endured severe melancholy and emulated his father into addiction. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself experienced periods of paralysing sadness and what he called “weird seizures”. His work Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must regularly have questioned whether he could become one himself.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, messy but handsome. Even before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could command a gathering. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his siblings – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he desired privacy, withdrawing into silence when in groups, disappearing for lonely journeys.
Deep Concerns and Crisis of Belief
In that period, earth scientists, star gazers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were raising frightening inquiries. If the timeline of life on Earth had started ages before the appearance of the mankind, then how to believe that the earth had been made for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely formed for us, who reside on a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The new optical instruments and lenses exposed areas immensely huge and creatures infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s faith, given such proof, in a divine being who had created mankind in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then could the human race meet the same fate?
Recurrent Motifs: Kraken and Friendship
Holmes binds his story together with dual persistent motifs. The initial he introduces at the beginning – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young student when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “Norse mythology, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the short poem introduces concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something vast, unutterable and mournful, concealed out of reach of human inquiry, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of verse and as the originator of images in which dreadful mystery is condensed into a few strikingly suggestive lines.
The second element is the contrast. Where the imaginary sea monster symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is fond and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest lines with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a grateful note in poetry describing him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on back, hand and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of pleasure nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent foolishness of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, multiple birds and a wren” made their homes.
