Uncharted Depths: Exploring Young Tennyson's Restless Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a torn individual. He even composed a verse titled The Two Voices, wherein dual aspects of the poet argued the pros and cons of ending his life. Through this illuminating work, the biographer elects to spotlight on the lesser known character of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
During 1850 was decisive for Tennyson. He unveiled the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for almost two decades. Consequently, he grew both renowned and wealthy. He wed, after a long courtship. Previously, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his family members, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or living alone in a ramshackle cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Now he moved into a residence where he could host notable visitors. He assumed the role of the national poet. His career as a renowned figure began.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, unkempt but handsome
Ancestral Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting susceptible to emotional swings and sadness. His parent, a hesitant clergyman, was irate and frequently drunk. Transpired an event, the particulars of which are unclear, that led to the family cook being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a lunatic asylum as a boy and remained there for life. Another experienced severe melancholy and copied his father into drinking. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of paralysing sadness and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is told by a insane person: he must regularly have wondered whether he was one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was commanding, even charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome. Prior to he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could control a space. But, having grown up crowded with his family members – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he sought out privacy, retreating into silence when in company, disappearing for solitary journeys.
Philosophical Concerns and Turmoil of Belief
In that period, earth scientists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were introducing appalling questions. If the story of living beings had begun eons before the emergence of the human race, then how to believe that the world had been created for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was only made for humanity, who inhabit a minor world of a ordinary star The new viewing devices and microscopes revealed spaces immensely huge and organisms infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s religion, in light of such findings, in a deity who had made mankind in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then could the mankind meet the same fate?
Persistent Themes: Sea Monster and Bond
The biographer ties his narrative together with a pair of recurring elements. The first he introduces at the beginning – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line poem introduces ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something vast, unutterable and sad, submerged inaccessible of human inquiry, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of metre and as the author of symbols in which terrible enigma is compressed into a few strikingly indicative lines.
The other theme is the contrast. Where the imaginary creature represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is affectionate and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive verses with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a appreciation message in rhyme depicting him in his garden with his tame doves sitting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on arm, palm and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of joy excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s notable praise of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant foolishness of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the old man with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a hen, multiple birds and a small bird” constructed their dwellings.
