The Boundless Deep: Examining Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself was known as a torn soul. He even composed a piece called The Two Voices, in which dual facets of himself argued the merits of suicide. Through this illuminating work, the biographer decides to concentrate on the overlooked identity of the poet.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 was decisive for Alfred. He released the great verse series In Memoriam, for which he had worked for close to two decades. As a result, he grew both famous and wealthy. He got married, subsequent to a 14‑year courtship. Previously, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his family members, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or living by himself in a rundown house on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Now he moved into a house where he could receive prominent guests. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His career as a celebrated individual began.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but attractive
Ancestral Turmoil
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting susceptible to moods and sadness. His paternal figure, a reluctant minister, was volatile and regularly intoxicated. Transpired an event, the details of which are vague, that caused the household servant being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a lunatic asylum as a youth and remained there for the rest of his days. Another endured severe melancholy and copied his father into addiction. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself endured episodes of debilitating sadness and what he called “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must regularly have wondered whether he was one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive. Before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could command a gathering. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he craved solitude, withdrawing into stillness when in company, retreating for individual journeys.
Philosophical Anxieties and Crisis of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the evolution, were raising frightening inquiries. If the timeline of existence had commenced eons before the emergence of the human race, then how to hold that the world had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely created for us, who reside on a minor world of a common sun.” The new telescopes and microscopes revealed spaces immensely huge and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s religion, given such findings, in a God who had made mankind in his form? If dinosaurs had become died out, then could the human race follow suit?
Repeating Motifs: Sea Monster and Friendship
The biographer weaves his account together with two persistent elements. The first he introduces early on – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line poem establishes concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something vast, indescribable and tragic, submerged beyond reach of human understanding, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the originator of metaphors in which dreadful unknown is compressed into a few dazzlingly evocative words.
The second motif is the counterpart. Where the mythical sea monster epitomises 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 lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, penned a appreciation message in rhyme depicting him in his rose garden with his tame doves perching all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on back, wrist and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of delight nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s great praise of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb nonsense of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “two owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a small bird” built their nests.
