Uncharted Depths: Examining Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself existed as a torn soul. He even composed a piece called The Two Voices, wherein contrasting facets of his personality debated the arguments of self-destruction. Through this illuminating work, the author decides to concentrate on the overlooked character of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
In the year 1850 was pivotal for Tennyson. He published the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for close to twenty years. Consequently, he became both famous and rich. He wed, following a extended courtship. Before that, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or residing alone in a rundown house on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. At that point he took a house where he could receive notable guests. He became the official poet. His career as a Great Man commenced.
Even as a youth he was imposing, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive
Lineage Turmoil
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting susceptible to temperament and melancholy. His parent, a hesitant clergyman, was volatile and frequently intoxicated. There was an occurrence, the details of which are unclear, that led to the family cook being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a boy and lived there for the rest of his days. Another endured profound melancholy and copied his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself endured periods of paralysing despair and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His Maud is told by a insane person: he must frequently have pondered whether he might turn into one personally.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome. Before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could dominate a space. But, being raised in close quarters with his siblings – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an adult he desired isolation, withdrawing into silence when in social settings, vanishing for solitary journeys.
Existential Anxieties and Turmoil of Faith
In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were posing disturbing questions. If the timeline of living beings had started ages before the arrival of the humanity, then how to maintain that the earth had been created for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was only made for us, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The recent optical instruments and magnifying tools uncovered realms immensely huge and creatures minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s faith, considering such proof, in a God who had made man in his form? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then could the humanity follow suit?
Recurrent Motifs: Mythical Beast and Friendship
The author weaves his story together with a pair of persistent motifs. The first he introduces initially – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line verse presents concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something immense, indescribable and mournful, submerged out of reach of human understanding, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of verse and as the creator of metaphors in which terrible enigma is packed into a few brilliantly indicative words.
The other element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary beast symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is affectionate and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic verses with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, composed a grateful note in verse describing him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on arm, hand and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of pleasure perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s great praise of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant absurdity of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the old man with a whiskers in which “two owls and a fowl, several songbirds and a small bird” made their homes.
