The Boundless Deep: Delving into Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a divided spirit. He produced a poem named The Two Voices, wherein two aspects of the poet argued the pros and cons of suicide. In this revealing work, the author elects to spotlight on the lesser known character of the writer.
A Critical Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 became crucial for Tennyson. He published the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for almost two decades. Consequently, he grew both celebrated and wealthy. He entered matrimony, following a long relationship. Before that, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his family members, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or living in solitude in a rundown cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. Then he acquired a residence where he could host distinguished guests. He became poet laureate. His existence as a Great Man commenced.
From his teens he was imposing, even charismatic. He was of great height, messy but good-looking
Lineage Challenges
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting susceptible to temperament and sadness. His father, a hesitant clergyman, was angry and regularly inebriated. Occurred an event, the particulars of which are vague, that resulted in the family cook being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a lunatic asylum as a child and remained there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from severe melancholy and copied his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself endured episodes of debilitating gloom and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is told by a madman: he must often have wondered whether he might turn into one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, disheveled but attractive. Before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a space. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an adult he desired privacy, withdrawing into silence when in groups, vanishing for individual journeys.
Existential Anxieties and Upheaval of Belief
In that period, rock experts, star gazers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were raising frightening inquiries. If the timeline of existence had started ages before the appearance of the human race, then how to believe that the planet had been made for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply created for mankind, who reside on a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The recent optical instruments and microscopes exposed realms immensely huge and beings tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s religion, given such evidence, in a God who had created mankind in his form? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then could the mankind meet the same fate?
Recurrent Themes: Sea Monster and Bond
The biographer weaves his narrative together with a pair of recurrent themes. The primary he establishes at the beginning – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “ancient legends, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief poem introduces ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something enormous, unspeakable and tragic, submerged out of reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a master of verse and as the author of symbols in which dreadful mystery is compressed into a few strikingly indicative words.
The additional element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical beast represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is affectionate and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest verses with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a appreciation message in poetry depicting him in his flower bed with his tame doves perching all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, palm and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of delight excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant nonsense of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the old man with a beard in which “two owls and a chicken, four larks and a wren” constructed their dwellings.