The Boundless Deep: Examining Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself existed as a divided spirit. He produced a verse titled The Two Voices, wherein dual facets of the poet debated the pros and cons of self-destruction. In this illuminating work, the biographer decides to concentrate on the lesser known identity of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 became pivotal for Tennyson. He published the monumental verse series In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for almost two decades. Consequently, he became both renowned and prosperous. He got married, after a 14‑year courtship. Earlier, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or staying in solitude in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. Now he took a house where he could entertain prominent callers. He was appointed poet laureate. His life as a renowned figure began.
Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive
Lineage Challenges
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting inclined to emotional swings and depression. His father, a hesitant minister, was volatile and regularly drunk. Transpired an event, the facts of which are unclear, that caused the family cook being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and remained there for life. Another suffered from deep despair and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself suffered from periods of debilitating gloom and what he termed “strange episodes”. His Maud is narrated by a madman: he must regularly have wondered whether he was one himself.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive. Even before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could dominate a gathering. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his family members – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he sought out solitude, retreating into stillness when in social settings, retreating for solitary excursions.
Philosophical Concerns and Turmoil of Faith
During his era, rock experts, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were raising frightening queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had begun ages before the appearance of the humanity, then how to hold that the world had been made for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only formed for mankind, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The new viewing devices and magnifying tools uncovered realms infinitely large and organisms infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s faith, in light of such evidence, in a deity who had created humanity in his form? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then would the human race follow suit?
Persistent Motifs: Mythical Beast and Bond
The author weaves his story together with two persistent themes. The primary he introduces initially – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the short sonnet introduces themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something vast, indescribable and tragic, hidden inaccessible of human inquiry, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a expert of metre and as the originator of images in which awful unknown is condensed into a few strikingly evocative lines.
The second motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional creature represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is loving and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest verses with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a grateful note in verse depicting him in his flower bed with his tame doves sitting all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, palm and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of pleasure perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant absurdity of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a beard in which “two owls and a fowl, multiple birds and a tiny creature” constructed their dwellings.
