The Boundless Deep: Examining Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a conflicted spirit. He famously wrote a verse titled The Two Voices, wherein dual facets of himself argued the pros and cons of suicide. Within this insightful volume, the biographer decides to concentrate on the lesser known persona of the writer.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
In the year 1850 became decisive for Alfred. He unveiled the significant verse series In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for close to two decades. Consequently, he emerged as both celebrated and prosperous. He got married, following a 14‑year relationship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his family members, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or living in solitude in a rundown cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Then he moved into a home where he could receive prominent guests. He was appointed the national poet. His career as a renowned figure started.
From his teens he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, messy but attractive
Family Struggles
The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning inclined to emotional swings and melancholy. His father, a unwilling priest, was irate and regularly intoxicated. There was an incident, the particulars of which are obscure, that led to the domestic worker being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a child and remained there for life. Another endured profound despair and emulated his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself endured bouts of overwhelming despair and what he called “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is told by a madman: he must often have wondered whether he was one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was striking, even glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive. Even before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a gathering. But, being raised in close quarters with his family members – three brothers to an small space – as an adult he sought out isolation, withdrawing into stillness when in company, disappearing for individual journeys.
Existential Anxieties and Upheaval of Conviction
In that period, earth scientists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were introducing frightening queries. If the timeline of living beings had begun millions of years before the arrival of the humanity, then how to hold that the planet had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely formed for humanity, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The modern optical instruments and magnifying tools revealed areas immensely huge and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s religion, in light of such proof, in a deity who had made humanity in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then would the mankind meet the same fate?
Persistent Elements: Sea Monster and Companionship
Holmes ties his account together with a pair of recurring elements. The first he establishes initially – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the short sonnet introduces concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something immense, indescribable and tragic, concealed inaccessible of investigation, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of rhythm and as the originator of symbols in which dreadful enigma is condensed into a few dazzlingly evocative phrases.
The other theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary sea monster epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is affectionate and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive verses with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in poetry depicting him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on back, hand and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of delight excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb absurdity of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, four larks and a small bird” built their dwellings.
