Uncharted Depths: Exploring Young Tennyson's Restless Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a conflicted soul. He produced a verse titled The Two Voices, where dual aspects of his personality argued the pros and cons of ending his life. Through this revealing work, the author chooses to focus on the lesser known identity of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 proved to be pivotal for Tennyson. He unveiled the significant verse series In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for close to two decades. As a result, he became both celebrated and prosperous. He wed, after a long relationship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his family members, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or living in solitude in a rundown house on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Then he moved into a house where he could receive distinguished callers. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His existence as a celebrated individual began.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, messy but handsome
Family Challenges
His family, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting susceptible to emotional swings and depression. His parent, a unwilling clergyman, was irate and very often drunk. Occurred an event, the particulars of which are vague, that caused the household servant being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a mental institution as a youth and remained there for his entire existence. Another endured deep depression and followed his father into drinking. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of debilitating gloom and what he called “strange episodes”. His work Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must often have wondered whether he could become one personally.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was commanding, even glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking. Even before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could control a room. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an small space – as an adult he craved isolation, retreating into quiet when in company, disappearing for solitary walking tours.
Existential Anxieties and Crisis of Belief
In that period, geologists, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were posing frightening inquiries. If the history of life on Earth had commenced millions of years before the emergence of the human race, then how to believe that the planet had been created for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely made for us, who live on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The new telescopes and magnifying tools uncovered realms immensely huge and beings infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s belief, given such proof, in a God who had created mankind in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then could the human race meet the same fate?
Recurrent Themes: Kraken and Friendship
Holmes ties his narrative together with two recurring elements. The initial he introduces initially – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the short poem presents ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something immense, unutterable and mournful, submerged beyond reach of human inquiry, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a expert of metre and as the creator of images in which awful unknown is packed into a few dazzlingly indicative phrases.
The additional element is the counterpart. Where the imaginary sea monster represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is affectionate and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in poetry describing him in his garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, wrist and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of joy excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s great praise of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant nonsense of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “two owls and a fowl, four larks and a tiny creature” constructed their dwellings.
