The Boundless Deep: Examining Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a torn individual. He famously wrote a verse called The Two Voices, where two aspects of his personality debated the merits of ending his life. In this revealing volume, the biographer decides to concentrate on the lesser known character of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 became crucial for Alfred. He released the great poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for close to twenty years. As a result, he grew both celebrated and prosperous. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a 14‑year courtship. Previously, he had been living in leased properties with his relatives, or lodging with male acquaintances in London, or residing alone in a dilapidated cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren coasts. At that point he moved into a house where he could host distinguished guests. He was appointed poet laureate. His existence as a celebrated individual commenced.
From his teens he was striking, almost glamorous. He was of great height, messy but good-looking
Lineage Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning susceptible to emotional swings and sadness. His paternal figure, a hesitant minister, was volatile and frequently drunk. Transpired an occurrence, the particulars of which are vague, that caused the family cook being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another experienced deep melancholy and copied his father into drinking. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of debilitating gloom and what he called “bizarre fits”. His Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must regularly have wondered whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was striking, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but good-looking. Prior to he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could control a room. But, being raised crowded with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an adult he desired isolation, withdrawing into stillness when in company, disappearing for solitary excursions.
Existential Concerns and Turmoil of Conviction
In that period, geologists, star gazers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the evolution, were raising frightening questions. If the history of living beings had begun millions of years before the arrival of the mankind, then how to believe that the earth had been made for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was only created for mankind, who live on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The recent optical instruments and microscopes uncovered spaces infinitely large and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s belief, given such findings, in a God who had made mankind in his form? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then would the human race follow suit?
Repeating Motifs: Mythical Beast and Friendship
The biographer weaves his story together with two persistent elements. The first he establishes early on – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young student when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the short sonnet introduces concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something vast, indescribable and tragic, concealed out of reach of human inquiry, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the originator of symbols in which awful unknown is packed into a few dazzlingly indicative phrases.
The other motif is the counterpart. Where the fictional creature epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is affectionate and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a thank-you letter in rhyme portraying him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, palm and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of pleasure excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb nonsense of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the old man with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, four larks and a wren” made their homes.
