The Boundless Deep: Delving into Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a torn soul. He produced a piece titled The Two Voices, where contrasting aspects of himself contemplated the arguments of self-destruction. Through this illuminating volume, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the more obscure identity of the poet.
A Defining Year: 1850
In the year 1850 proved to be decisive for Tennyson. He unveiled the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for almost twenty years. Therefore, he grew both famous and rich. He got married, following a extended relationship. Earlier, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or living alone in a rundown cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Now he moved into a residence where he could receive prominent callers. He was appointed the official poet. His life as a renowned figure began.
From his teens he was commanding, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive
Family Struggles
His family, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating prone to temperament and sadness. His father, a reluctant minister, was angry and frequently inebriated. Occurred an incident, the details of which are obscure, that led to the family cook being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a child and remained there for his entire existence. Another suffered from severe melancholy and emulated his father into drinking. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of paralysing sadness and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His work Maud is told by a lunatic: he must often have wondered whether he might turn into one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was imposing, even charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but attractive. Before he began to wear a dark cloak and sombrero, he could control a room. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his siblings – three brothers to an attic room – as an mature individual he sought out solitude, withdrawing into silence when in groups, vanishing for individual journeys.
Philosophical Concerns and Crisis of Faith
In that period, rock experts, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were raising disturbing queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had begun millions of years before the arrival of the humanity, then how to maintain that the planet had been formed for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only created for mankind, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The recent optical instruments and lenses uncovered realms immensely huge and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s faith, in light of such proof, in a deity who had made mankind in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then would the human race follow suit?
Repeating Themes: Sea Monster and Friendship
The biographer weaves his account together with a pair of persistent themes. The initial he establishes initially – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “Nordic tales, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the short verse establishes themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something immense, unutterable and mournful, concealed inaccessible of human inquiry, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of rhythm and as the originator of metaphors in which dreadful enigma is packed into a few strikingly suggestive phrases.
The other theme is the contrast. Where the fictional beast epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is fond and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in poetry depicting him in his flower bed with his tame doves perching all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on back, wrist and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of pleasure nicely suited to FitzGerald’s great praise of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant foolishness of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, four larks and a tiny creature” built their homes.
