The Boundless Deep: Delving into Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a conflicted spirit. He even composed a verse called The Two Voices, in which two facets of himself contemplated the pros and cons of ending his life. Within this revealing volume, the biographer decides to concentrate on the more obscure character of the writer.
A Defining Year: 1850
In the year 1850 proved to be pivotal for Tennyson. He released the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for nearly twenty years. Therefore, he became both famous and rich. He wed, after a 14‑year courtship. Earlier, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or living alone in a ramshackle cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren coasts. At that point he took a residence where he could entertain distinguished guests. He became poet laureate. His career as a Great Man started.
Even as a youth he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking
Lineage Struggles
His family, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, indicating inclined to temperament and melancholy. His father, a unwilling priest, was volatile and very often drunk. Transpired an occurrence, the facts of which are vague, that caused the household servant being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and stayed there for his entire existence. Another endured profound depression and copied his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself experienced episodes of paralysing gloom and what he termed “strange episodes”. His work Maud is narrated by a madman: he must often have wondered whether he could become one in his own right.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was commanding, even charismatic. He was very tall, disheveled but good-looking. Even before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a room. But, having grown up crowded with his family members – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an adult he desired solitude, withdrawing into silence when in groups, disappearing for solitary journeys.
Existential Fears and Crisis of Conviction
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, star gazers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were introducing appalling queries. If the story of living beings had commenced eons before the arrival of the mankind, then how to hold that the world had been made for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely formed for mankind, who live on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The recent viewing devices and microscopes exposed spaces infinitely large and organisms infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s belief, given such proof, in a divine being who had made humanity in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then could the humanity follow suit?
Repeating Elements: Kraken and Bond
The author binds his story together with a pair of recurrent themes. The first he establishes initially – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young student when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the short verse establishes concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something immense, unutterable and mournful, submerged beyond reach of human understanding, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a master of rhythm and as the author of images in which terrible mystery is packed into a few dazzlingly suggestive lines.
The additional motif is the counterpart. Where the imaginary sea monster symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, conjures all that is loving and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a appreciation message in verse depicting him in his flower bed with his pet birds resting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on back, hand and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of joy nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s great praise of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent foolishness of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, multiple birds and a tiny creature” built their homes.
