The Boundless Deep: Delving into Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a torn soul. He produced a verse named The Two Voices, in which two facets of himself contemplated the merits of ending his life. Within this revealing volume, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the overlooked persona of the writer.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 was crucial for the poet. He unveiled the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for close to twenty years. Therefore, he grew both celebrated and wealthy. He entered matrimony, following a 14‑year engagement. Before that, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his family members, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or living in solitude in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. At that point he acquired a residence where he could host notable visitors. He became poet laureate. His existence as a Great Man started.
Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on magnetic. He was very tall, messy but attractive
Family Turmoil
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting inclined to emotional swings and sadness. His paternal figure, a hesitant minister, was angry and regularly drunk. Transpired an event, the details of which are vague, that led to the household servant being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a mental institution as a youth and remained there for his entire existence. Another experienced severe depression and copied his father into addiction. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself suffered from periods of paralysing sadness and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is told by a madman: he must frequently have questioned whether he was one in his own right.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
Even as a youth he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but handsome. Prior to he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a room. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his siblings – multiple siblings to an small space – as an adult he sought out solitude, retreating into stillness when in groups, disappearing for individual walking tours.
Existential Concerns and Upheaval of Conviction
In that period, rock experts, star gazers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the evolution, were posing appalling queries. If the history of existence had started eons before the arrival of the mankind, then how to believe that the world had been created for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only made for mankind, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The modern optical instruments and microscopes uncovered areas infinitely large and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s religion, considering such proof, in a deity who had created mankind in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then would the mankind follow suit?
Recurrent Themes: Mythical Beast and Companionship
The author binds his narrative together with two persistent themes. The first he presents at the beginning – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Norse mythology, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line verse introduces concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something enormous, indescribable and tragic, submerged out of reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of verse and as the author of images in which awful enigma is packed into a few dazzlingly evocative lines.
The additional motif is the counterpart. Where the mythical sea monster represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic verses with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in poetry describing him in his garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on back, hand and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of pleasure excellently suited to FitzGerald’s significant praise of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent foolishness of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s poem about the old man with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, multiple birds and a small bird” built their nests.
