Uncharted Depths: Examining Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a conflicted spirit. He famously wrote a poem named The Two Voices, where contrasting versions of his personality argued the pros and cons of self-destruction. Through this insightful volume, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the lesser known identity of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: 1850
In the year 1850 was crucial for the poet. He unveiled the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had worked for almost two decades. Consequently, he became both renowned and prosperous. He wed, after a long courtship. Previously, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his family members, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or staying by himself in a rundown house on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. Now he moved into a home where he could receive prominent callers. He assumed the role of the national poet. His life as a celebrated individual started.
Even as a youth he was imposing, almost glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome
Family Struggles
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, indicating inclined to temperament and depression. His parent, a reluctant priest, was irate and very often intoxicated. Transpired an occurrence, the details of which are vague, that caused the family cook being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a mental institution as a youth and remained there for his entire existence. Another endured profound melancholy and followed his father into alcoholism. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself experienced periods of paralysing sadness and what he called “strange episodes”. His work Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must regularly have wondered whether he might turn into one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but good-looking. Before he began to wear a dark cloak and sombrero, he could dominate a gathering. But, maturing in close quarters with his family members – multiple siblings to an small space – as an adult he craved isolation, retreating into silence when in groups, vanishing for individual excursions.
Philosophical Fears and Crisis of Conviction
In that period, rock experts, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were raising frightening questions. If the story of life on Earth had started ages before the appearance of the human race, then how to believe that the earth had been created for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely formed for mankind, who live on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The new optical instruments and lenses exposed realms vast beyond measure and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s belief, given such evidence, in a divine being who had created mankind in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the human race do so too?
Persistent Elements: Sea Monster and Bond
The biographer weaves his account together with a pair of recurrent motifs. The initial he presents at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short sonnet establishes themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something immense, unutterable and tragic, concealed out of reach of investigation, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a master of verse and as the author of metaphors in which dreadful unknown is packed into a few dazzlingly evocative lines.
The other motif is the counterpart. Where the fictional sea monster epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is fond and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive verses with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a grateful note in poetry describing him in his flower bed with his pet birds perching all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on back, hand and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of delight excellently suited to FitzGerald’s great praise of hedonism – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent nonsense of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, four larks and a small bird” made their nests.
