The Boundless Deep: Examining Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a conflicted individual. He even composed a poem called The Two Voices, in which dual versions of the poet contemplated the merits of self-destruction. Within this revealing book, the author chooses to focus on the more obscure persona of the writer.
A Critical Year: 1850
In the year 1850 was decisive for Tennyson. He published the significant verse series In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for nearly two decades. As a result, he became both renowned and rich. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a extended engagement. Previously, he had been living in leased properties with his family members, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or living by himself in a dilapidated house on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren shores. At that point he moved into a residence where he could receive distinguished callers. He was appointed poet laureate. His existence as a celebrated individual began.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive
Lineage Challenges
The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, indicating inclined to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a hesitant clergyman, was irate and very often inebriated. There was an occurrence, the details of which are obscure, that resulted in the family cook being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a mental institution as a youth and remained there for life. Another experienced severe despair and copied his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself endured periods of debilitating sadness and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is narrated by a madman: he must regularly have wondered whether he could become one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was imposing, even charismatic. He was very tall, messy but attractive. Prior to he began to wear a dark cloak and headwear, he could dominate a gathering. But, being raised crowded with his siblings – three brothers to an small space – as an adult he craved isolation, withdrawing into quiet when in groups, disappearing for individual excursions.
Existential Concerns and Turmoil of Belief
During his era, geologists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were raising frightening queries. If the timeline of living beings had commenced eons before the appearance of the human race, then how to hold that the earth had been created for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply made for mankind, who live on a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The modern viewing devices and lenses uncovered realms immensely huge and beings tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s belief, considering such evidence, in a God who had formed man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then would the humanity do so too?
Repeating Themes: Mythical Beast and Companionship
The biographer weaves his narrative together with dual recurrent themes. The first he presents at the beginning – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the 15-line poem introduces concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something immense, unspeakable and mournful, concealed inaccessible of human inquiry, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of metre and as the originator of symbols in which awful mystery is packed into a few strikingly evocative words.
The second motif is the counterpart. Where the imaginary sea monster epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, conjures all that is fond and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic lines with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a grateful note in verse describing him in his flower bed with his pet birds resting all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on back, wrist and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of pleasure perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s great celebration of hedonism – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant nonsense of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, four larks and a tiny creature” made their dwellings.