Uncharted Depths: Examining Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a conflicted individual. He even composed a verse named The Two Voices, in which dual facets of his personality argued the merits of suicide. In this revealing volume, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the overlooked character of the poet.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
In the year 1850 was crucial for Tennyson. He released the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for close to a long period. As a result, he emerged as both renowned and rich. He entered matrimony, after a extended courtship. Before that, he had been living in rented homes with his relatives, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or living by himself in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren shores. Then he moved into a house where he could host distinguished guests. He assumed the role of the national poet. His life as a renowned figure began.
Even as a youth he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking
Lineage Struggles
His family, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning prone to moods and melancholy. His paternal figure, a reluctant priest, was angry and regularly inebriated. Occurred an occurrence, the particulars of which are obscure, that led to the domestic worker being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a mental institution as a child and lived there for life. Another endured severe melancholy and copied his father into drinking. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself experienced bouts of overwhelming despair and what he called “strange episodes”. His work Maud is voiced by a insane person: 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 imposing, even glamorous. He was very tall, messy but attractive. Even before he began to wear a dark cloak and headwear, he could dominate a room. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his family members – several relatives to an small space – as an mature individual he craved privacy, withdrawing into silence when in social settings, disappearing for lonely journeys.
Existential Concerns and Upheaval of Faith
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were raising frightening questions. If the story of existence had begun eons before the emergence of the mankind, then how to maintain that the earth had been created for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely created for mankind, who reside on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The modern telescopes and magnifying tools exposed spaces infinitely large and creatures infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s faith, given such evidence, in a deity who had created humanity in his form? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the mankind follow suit?
Recurrent Elements: Mythical Beast and Friendship
The biographer ties his narrative together with dual recurring themes. The primary he introduces at the beginning – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “Norse mythology, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short sonnet establishes ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something vast, unutterable and mournful, concealed out of reach of human inquiry, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a expert of verse and as the creator of images in which terrible mystery is compressed into a few strikingly indicative words.
The second theme is the contrast. Where the fictional creature symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, wrote a grateful note in verse depicting him in his garden with his tame doves resting all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on arm, wrist and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of joy perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb absurdity of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, four larks and a tiny creature” made their dwellings.
