The Boundless Deep: Examining Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a conflicted individual. He even composed a poem named The Two Voices, wherein contrasting facets of his personality debated the pros and cons of suicide. Through this revealing book, the biographer chooses to focus on the lesser known persona of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 proved to be crucial for the poet. He unveiled the great poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for close to two decades. Consequently, he emerged as both celebrated and wealthy. He wed, subsequent to a extended courtship. Earlier, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his family members, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or staying alone in a dilapidated house on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Then he moved into a home where he could entertain notable guests. He became poet laureate. His existence as a celebrated individual commenced.
Even as a youth he was imposing, almost glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome
Ancestral Challenges
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting prone to emotional swings and sadness. His paternal figure, a unwilling minister, was angry and very often intoxicated. Transpired an event, the details of which are obscure, that resulted in the family cook being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and lived there for life. Another suffered from deep depression and copied his father into drinking. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of debilitating despair and what he called “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must regularly have questioned whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking. Prior to he adopted a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could control a gathering. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his family members – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he craved privacy, escaping into stillness when in social settings, retreating for individual excursions.
Existential Concerns and Turmoil of Belief
During his era, rock experts, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were introducing frightening queries. If the timeline of living beings had commenced millions of years before the appearance of the mankind, then how to believe that the world had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely created for mankind, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The recent telescopes and lenses uncovered areas immensely huge and beings infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s faith, considering such evidence, in a deity who had formed humanity in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become died out, then might the human race do so too?
Repeating Motifs: Kraken and Bond
The author binds his account together with dual persistent elements. The primary he establishes at the beginning – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young student when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the short sonnet introduces ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something vast, unspeakable and mournful, submerged inaccessible of human understanding, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of metre and as the author of images in which dreadful enigma is packed into a few dazzlingly evocative lines.
The additional theme is the counterpart. Where the imaginary sea monster represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in rhyme depicting him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on arm, wrist and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of joy nicely suited to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb nonsense of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a small bird” built their homes.
