The Boundless Deep: Delving into Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself was known as a divided soul. He even composed a piece named The Two Voices, wherein dual aspects of his personality debated the merits of ending his life. Through this illuminating volume, the biographer decides to concentrate on the lesser known identity of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: The Mid-Century
During 1850 became crucial for Tennyson. He unveiled the monumental verse series In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for nearly a long period. As a result, he became both famous and prosperous. He wed, after a 14‑year relationship. Previously, he had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or residing alone in a dilapidated house on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. Now he moved into a house where he could entertain notable callers. He became poet laureate. His existence as a Great Man started.
From his teens he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking
Ancestral Struggles
The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning prone to emotional swings and depression. His paternal figure, a reluctant minister, was angry and very often drunk. There was an occurrence, the facts of which are vague, that caused the family cook being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a lunatic asylum as a boy and lived there for his entire existence. Another experienced deep melancholy and copied his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself endured episodes of overwhelming sadness and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is voiced by a madman: he must frequently have questioned whether he was one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was striking, almost charismatic. He was of great height, messy but handsome. Prior to he started wearing a dark cloak and sombrero, he could command a room. But, having grown up crowded with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an small space – as an mature individual he sought out solitude, escaping into silence when in groups, retreating for solitary walking tours.
Existential Fears and Crisis of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were introducing frightening questions. If the story of existence had started ages before the emergence of the humanity, then how to hold that the world had been created for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply created for us, who live on a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The recent telescopes and lenses uncovered spaces immensely huge and beings infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s faith, in light of such proof, in a deity who had made humanity in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then could the human race meet the same fate?
Persistent Themes: Sea Monster and Friendship
The author weaves his story together with dual recurrent themes. The primary he introduces initially – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful student when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short verse introduces themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something vast, unutterable and mournful, submerged beyond reach of human understanding, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a expert of verse and as the author of images in which dreadful enigma is compressed into a few brilliantly indicative words.
The other element is the counterpart. Where the imaginary beast epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is loving and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive verses with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a appreciation message in poetry portraying him in his rose garden with his pet birds resting all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, hand and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of joy excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb foolishness of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s poem about the old man with a facial hair in which “two owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a wren” built their homes.
