The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a conflicted spirit. He produced a poem called The Two Voices, wherein contrasting aspects of his personality debated the arguments of suicide. Within this revealing volume, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the lesser known persona of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
During 1850 was crucial for Tennyson. He published the great poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had worked for close to two decades. Therefore, he grew both renowned and wealthy. He wed, subsequent to a 14‑year engagement. Before that, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or residing alone in a rundown dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. At that point he acquired a house where he could receive notable callers. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His career as a renowned figure began.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was very tall, unkempt but attractive
Lineage Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating inclined to emotional swings and melancholy. His paternal figure, a reluctant priest, was angry and very often inebriated. Transpired an occurrence, the particulars of which are obscure, that resulted in the family cook being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a mental institution as a youth and remained there for life. Another endured profound despair and followed his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from periods of paralysing despair and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His Maud is told by a insane person: he must frequently have pondered whether he was one himself.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but attractive. Even before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a space. But, having grown up crowded with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an adult he sought out solitude, escaping into silence when in social settings, retreating for solitary excursions.
Existential Anxieties and Upheaval of Faith
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the evolution, were posing frightening queries. If the history of life on Earth had started ages before the emergence of the human race, then how to hold that the world had been made for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely formed for mankind, who live on a minor world of a third-rate sun The new viewing devices and microscopes uncovered spaces infinitely large and organisms minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s religion, in light of such findings, in a deity who had formed mankind in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the mankind follow suit?
Recurrent Themes: Kraken and Friendship
The author binds his narrative together with two recurrent themes. The initial he presents initially – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line verse presents concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something immense, indescribable and sad, submerged inaccessible of human inquiry, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a master of rhythm and as the creator of metaphors in which awful unknown is compressed into a few dazzlingly suggestive phrases.
The other element is the contrast. Where the fictional beast symbolises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is loving and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, composed a grateful note in verse portraying him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, hand and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of pleasure perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s notable praise of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb foolishness of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, four larks and a wren” made their dwellings.
