The Boundless Deep: Delving into Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a conflicted spirit. He even composed a piece named The Two Voices, in which dual facets of the poet argued the arguments of ending his life. Through this illuminating work, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the lesser known persona of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 became decisive for Alfred. He unveiled the great verse series In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for close to a long period. Therefore, he emerged as both renowned and prosperous. He entered matrimony, after a extended courtship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or staying alone in a rundown dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren shores. Then he took a home where he could entertain distinguished guests. He assumed the role of the official poet. His life as a Great Man began.
From his teens he was striking, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but good-looking
Family Turmoil
His family, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning inclined to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a hesitant clergyman, was angry and regularly drunk. Occurred an event, the facts of which are unclear, that caused the domestic worker being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and remained there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from severe depression and copied his father into addiction. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself experienced bouts of paralysing despair and what he called “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is narrated by a madman: he must often have questioned whether he could become one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was striking, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking. Prior to he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could control a room. But, having grown up crowded with his siblings – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he sought out solitude, retreating into silence when in groups, disappearing for individual journeys.
Philosophical Concerns and Crisis of Faith
In that period, geologists, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were posing frightening inquiries. If the history of living beings had started millions of years before the appearance of the human race, then how to maintain that the earth had been created for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely created for us, who inhabit a minor world of a common sun.” The recent viewing devices and magnifying tools revealed realms vast beyond measure and beings infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s religion, in light of such proof, in a deity who had created mankind in his form? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then might the humanity meet the same fate?
Recurrent Elements: Mythical Beast and Companionship
The author weaves his story together with two recurring elements. The first he presents early on – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Norse mythology, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line sonnet presents themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something immense, unutterable and tragic, submerged beyond reach of investigation, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a master of verse and as the creator of metaphors in which dreadful enigma is condensed into a few brilliantly indicative words.
The other theme is the contrast. Where the mythical beast represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is affectionate and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a grateful note in poetry describing him in his flower bed with his pet birds sitting all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, wrist and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of pleasure nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant absurdity of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the old man with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, multiple birds and a tiny creature” made their homes.
