The Boundless Deep: Examining Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Alfred Tennyson existed as a conflicted individual. He produced a verse named The Two Voices, where contrasting versions of his personality contemplated the pros and cons of suicide. Within this insightful volume, the biographer decides to concentrate on the overlooked identity of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 became pivotal for Alfred. He released the significant verse series In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for close to two decades. As a result, he became both famous and prosperous. He entered matrimony, following a long courtship. Earlier, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or residing in solitude in a rundown house on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Then he acquired a house where he could entertain prominent callers. He became poet laureate. His existence as a celebrated individual started.
From his teens he was striking, even magnetic. He was of great height, messy but handsome
Ancestral Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting inclined to temperament and melancholy. His parent, a hesitant priest, was volatile and frequently drunk. Transpired an event, the particulars of which are obscure, that resulted in the domestic worker being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a lunatic asylum as a boy and stayed there for his entire existence. Another endured profound despair and followed his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from periods of overwhelming sadness and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His Maud is told by a lunatic: he must regularly have pondered whether he might turn into one himself.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive. Even before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could control a space. But, being raised in close quarters with his siblings – multiple siblings to an small space – as an grown man he sought out privacy, escaping into quiet when in company, retreating for solitary walking tours.
Deep Concerns and Crisis of Belief
In that period, rock experts, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Darwin about the origin of species, were raising appalling queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had started eons before the appearance of the humanity, then how to hold that the earth had been created for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was only made for mankind, who inhabit a minor world of a ordinary star The modern optical instruments and microscopes uncovered realms infinitely large and organisms infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s belief, considering such findings, in a God who had created humanity in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then could the human race follow suit?
Persistent Themes: Sea Monster and Bond
Holmes ties his narrative together with two recurrent themes. The first he establishes initially – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “ancient legends, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line verse establishes themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, hidden beyond reach of human understanding, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a expert of verse and as the author of images in which terrible unknown is packed into a few strikingly evocative phrases.
The second motif is the counterpart. Where the mythical beast epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is fond and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic verses with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, penned a grateful note in verse depicting him in his rose garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, wrist and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of delight excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s great celebration of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent absurdity of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, several songbirds and a small bird” built their nests.
