The Boundless Deep: Exploring Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself existed as a torn individual. He even composed a piece titled The Two Voices, where dual versions of his personality debated the pros and cons of self-destruction. Within this insightful work, the biographer elects to spotlight on the more obscure persona of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
In the year 1850 proved to be decisive for the poet. He unveiled the monumental verse series In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for close to a long period. Therefore, he grew both famous and rich. He wed, subsequent to a long engagement. Previously, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or residing in solitude in a dilapidated house on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren coasts. Now he moved into a home where he could host distinguished guests. He became the national poet. His life as a celebrated individual commenced.
From his teens he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but good-looking
Ancestral Struggles
His family, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning prone to emotional swings and melancholy. His paternal figure, a unwilling clergyman, was irate and very often intoxicated. There was an event, the facts of which are obscure, that resulted in the family cook being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a mental institution as a boy and lived there for life. Another suffered from deep despair and followed his father into addiction. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself suffered from periods of overwhelming despair and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is voiced by a madman: he must regularly have pondered whether he could become one himself.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking. Prior to he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could command a space. But, being raised crowded with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he sought out privacy, withdrawing into silence when in groups, retreating for solitary excursions.
Existential Anxieties and Upheaval of Faith
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were introducing disturbing questions. If the timeline of existence had started eons before the emergence of the humanity, then how to hold that the planet had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only made for humanity, who inhabit a minor world of a third-rate sun The modern optical instruments and lenses revealed realms vast beyond measure and organisms minutely tiny: how to keep one’s belief, in light of such proof, in a divine being who had created mankind in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the human race follow suit?
Persistent Motifs: Kraken and Companionship
The author weaves his story together with two recurrent themes. The primary he presents early on – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the short sonnet presents themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something enormous, unutterable and sad, concealed out of reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the author of images in which terrible unknown is packed into a few strikingly evocative words.
The other motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical beast symbolises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is affectionate and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest lines with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a grateful note in poetry describing him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on back, hand and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of delight perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant nonsense of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, multiple birds and a small bird” constructed their nests.
