Uncharted Depths: Examining Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a conflicted individual. He famously wrote a piece called The Two Voices, where dual facets of the poet contemplated the pros and cons of ending his life. Within this revealing book, the biographer elects to spotlight on the lesser known identity of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 proved to be pivotal for Tennyson. He unveiled the significant verse series In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for almost twenty years. Consequently, he emerged as both famous and rich. He wed, after a long relationship. Earlier, he had been living in leased properties with his family members, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or living alone in a dilapidated cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Then he took a house where he could entertain distinguished callers. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His life as a celebrated individual started.
From his teens he was striking, almost charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive
Family Struggles
His family, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting prone to moods and sadness. His paternal figure, a reluctant clergyman, was angry and very often drunk. There was an occurrence, the details of which are unclear, that resulted in the domestic worker being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a mental institution as a child and stayed there for life. Another suffered from profound despair and copied his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from periods of debilitating despair and what he called “strange episodes”. His work Maud is told by a madman: he must frequently have pondered whether he was one in his own right.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, even charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but attractive. Even before he began to wear a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a space. But, being raised crowded with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he craved privacy, escaping into silence when in groups, disappearing for individual journeys.
Existential Fears and Upheaval of Conviction
In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were introducing frightening inquiries. If the timeline of living beings had commenced eons before the emergence of the mankind, then how to hold that the world had been created for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply formed for mankind, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The modern optical instruments and magnifying tools exposed spaces vast beyond measure and organisms infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s faith, given such proof, in a deity who had made man in his form? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then might the human race meet the same fate?
Recurrent Motifs: Kraken and Bond
The author ties his story together with two persistent elements. The first he establishes at the beginning – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the 15-line sonnet establishes themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something vast, unutterable and mournful, hidden inaccessible of human inquiry, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of verse and as the author of metaphors in which terrible unknown is condensed into a few dazzlingly indicative words.
The additional motif is the contrast. Where the fictional creature epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is fond and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, composed a appreciation message in poetry portraying him in his garden with his tame doves resting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on back, palm and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an image of joy perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant absurdity of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a beard in which “two owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a tiny creature” built their dwellings.
