Uncharted Depths: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a divided individual. He produced a verse called The Two Voices, where dual versions of his personality contemplated the arguments of suicide. In this revealing work, the biographer decides to concentrate on the lesser known identity of the poet.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
In the year 1850 proved to be pivotal for the poet. He unveiled the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had worked for almost two decades. As a result, he emerged as both renowned and rich. He entered matrimony, after a extended relationship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his relatives, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or residing alone in a rundown cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Now he took a house where he could receive notable guests. He was appointed the national poet. His life as a renowned figure commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was striking, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but good-looking
Family Challenges
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting prone to temperament and melancholy. His paternal figure, a unwilling priest, was irate and regularly inebriated. There was an occurrence, the facts of which are vague, that led to the family cook being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a child and remained there for his entire existence. Another experienced profound depression and followed his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself experienced episodes of paralysing sadness and what he called “weird seizures”. His work Maud is narrated by a madman: he must regularly have questioned whether he was one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, messy but handsome. Even before he started wearing a dark cloak and headwear, he could command a space. But, being raised in close quarters with his family members – several relatives to an small space – as an adult he desired privacy, retreating into silence when in groups, vanishing for solitary excursions.
Philosophical Anxieties and Turmoil of Faith
In that period, rock experts, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were introducing disturbing questions. If the history of living beings had started eons before the arrival of the mankind, then how to hold that the earth had been created for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply made for us, who inhabit a minor world of a third-rate sun The recent telescopes and magnifying tools exposed spaces infinitely large and creatures minutely tiny: how to keep one’s faith, considering such evidence, in a deity who had made man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then would the humanity meet the same fate?
Persistent Motifs: Sea Monster and Companionship
The biographer weaves his story together with a pair of recurrent themes. The initial he establishes early on – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the brief sonnet introduces ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something enormous, unutterable and sad, concealed inaccessible of human understanding, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a master of verse and as the originator of images in which awful enigma is compressed into a few dazzlingly indicative words.
The additional element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical sea monster symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is loving and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a grateful note in poetry describing him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, wrist and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of delight nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s significant praise of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant absurdity of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, four larks and a small bird” made their nests.
