The Boundless Deep: Delving into Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a conflicted individual. He even composed a verse titled The Two Voices, wherein contrasting aspects of the poet argued the pros and cons of ending his life. In this revealing book, the author decides to concentrate on the lesser known character of the writer.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 became crucial for Alfred. He released the monumental verse series In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for almost twenty years. Therefore, he became both celebrated and prosperous. He entered matrimony, after a extended relationship. Previously, he had been residing in rented homes with his family members, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or living by himself in a rundown house on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Then he acquired a home where he could host prominent guests. He became the national poet. His existence as a celebrated individual commenced.
Even as a youth he was imposing, even magnetic. He was very tall, messy but attractive
Family Struggles
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating susceptible to moods and depression. His parent, a unwilling minister, was volatile and regularly intoxicated. There was an event, the details of which are vague, that led to the domestic worker being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a lunatic asylum as a child and remained there for life. Another endured severe depression and copied his father into addiction. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself experienced episodes of overwhelming sadness and what he termed “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is narrated by a madman: he must often have questioned whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was striking, even charismatic. He was very tall, disheveled but attractive. 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 mature individual he sought out isolation, retreating into silence when in company, retreating for individual excursions.
Deep Fears and Crisis of Belief
In that period, earth scientists, celestial observers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were introducing appalling inquiries. If the timeline of life on Earth had commenced eons before the appearance of the human race, then how to hold that the planet had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only created for us, who live on a minor world of a common sun.” The new telescopes and lenses revealed realms vast beyond measure and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s belief, given such findings, in a deity who had made man in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then might the humanity follow suit?
Repeating Elements: Sea Monster and Bond
The biographer ties his narrative together with two recurring themes. The primary he establishes initially – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line poem introduces ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something vast, unutterable and mournful, submerged out of reach of human understanding, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a master of verse and as the originator of metaphors in which terrible unknown is compressed into a few dazzlingly evocative phrases.
The other element is the contrast. Where the mythical creature symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is fond and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, composed a appreciation message in rhyme depicting him in his rose garden with his tame doves sitting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, palm and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of delight perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s significant praise of hedonism – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb absurdity of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, four larks and a tiny creature” constructed their dwellings.
