The Boundless Deep: Examining Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a conflicted soul. He famously wrote a verse called The Two Voices, where dual versions of his personality argued the arguments of suicide. In this insightful volume, the author decides to concentrate on the overlooked persona of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 became decisive for Tennyson. He released the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had worked for close to a long period. Therefore, he became both renowned and rich. He entered matrimony, following a 14‑year courtship. Previously, he had been living in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or residing alone in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren shores. At that point he took a home where he could host prominent guests. He was appointed the national poet. His existence as a celebrated individual began.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, even charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking
Family Struggles
His family, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating inclined to moods and depression. His paternal figure, a unwilling clergyman, was volatile and very often drunk. Occurred an occurrence, the details of which are unclear, that led to the family cook being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and lived there for life. Another experienced severe despair and followed his father into addiction. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself endured periods of overwhelming despair and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is told by a insane person: he must frequently have wondered whether he could become one himself.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was very tall, disheveled but good-looking. Prior to he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could control a space. But, being raised crowded with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an mature individual he sought out solitude, retreating into quiet when in company, retreating for individual journeys.
Existential Concerns and Upheaval of Conviction
In that period, earth scientists, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were posing disturbing inquiries. If the timeline of existence had commenced millions of years before the emergence of the humanity, then how to hold that the planet had been created for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely formed for humanity, who live on a minor world of a common sun.” The recent telescopes and microscopes uncovered realms infinitely large and organisms infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s faith, in light of such findings, in a deity who had made mankind in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then would the humanity follow suit?
Repeating Themes: Kraken and Bond
The biographer ties his story together with dual recurring motifs. The first he introduces at the beginning – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the brief verse introduces concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something enormous, unutterable and mournful, hidden out of reach of investigation, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a master of metre and as the author of symbols in which dreadful mystery is packed into a few brilliantly indicative phrases.
The additional element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional beast represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a grateful note in rhyme portraying him in his garden with his tame doves resting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on arm, palm and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of pleasure excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant absurdity of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “two owls and a fowl, four larks and a tiny creature” made their nests.