The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a torn individual. He produced a poem called The Two Voices, wherein contrasting facets of himself argued the pros and cons of ending his life. Within this insightful volume, the author elects to spotlight on the more obscure character of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 was decisive for Tennyson. He published the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had worked for close to a long period. As a result, he emerged as both renowned and wealthy. He got married, following a extended engagement. Previously, he had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or residing in solitude in a rundown dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Now he took a residence where he could host notable visitors. He became poet laureate. His existence as a celebrated individual started.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was very tall, messy but good-looking
Ancestral Challenges
His family, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating inclined to moods and sadness. His parent, a reluctant clergyman, was angry and regularly intoxicated. Transpired an incident, the facts of which are vague, that led to the family cook being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and lived there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from deep melancholy and emulated his father into drinking. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of debilitating sadness and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must regularly have wondered whether he could become one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive. Even before he started wearing a dark cloak and headwear, he could control a gathering. But, having grown up crowded with his siblings – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he desired solitude, retreating into stillness when in social settings, vanishing for individual excursions.
Philosophical Anxieties and Turmoil of Conviction
In that period, earth scientists, star gazers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were introducing disturbing questions. If the timeline of living beings had begun ages before the emergence of the mankind, then how to hold that the earth had been made for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely made for humanity, who live on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The new viewing devices and lenses revealed realms immensely huge and organisms minutely tiny: how to keep one’s belief, considering such findings, in a deity who had formed man in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then might the human race follow suit?
Persistent Motifs: Sea Monster and Bond
The author weaves his narrative together with a pair of persistent elements. The initial he presents at the beginning – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the 15-line verse introduces concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something enormous, indescribable and tragic, concealed beyond reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of metre and as the originator of images in which awful mystery is condensed into a few dazzlingly indicative phrases.
The additional motif is the counterpart. Where the imaginary creature epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is affectionate and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic verses with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, composed a appreciation message in rhyme describing him in his rose garden with his tame doves resting all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, wrist and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an image of joy excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb foolishness of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a beard in which “two owls and a hen, four larks and a small bird” built their dwellings.
