The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a torn spirit. He produced a verse called The Two Voices, where two facets of himself contemplated the merits of ending his life. In this illuminating book, the author elects to spotlight on the more obscure persona of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 proved to be crucial for the poet. He unveiled the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had worked for nearly twenty years. Consequently, he emerged as both famous and wealthy. He wed, following a 14‑year relationship. Earlier, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his family members, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or living by himself in a dilapidated house on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Then he took a house where he could receive distinguished visitors. He was appointed the official poet. His career as a Great Man commenced.
Even as a youth he was striking, even magnetic. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome
Family Struggles
His family, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting susceptible to moods and sadness. His paternal figure, a unwilling clergyman, was irate and very often intoxicated. Occurred an event, the facts of which are vague, that led to the domestic worker being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a lunatic asylum as a child and remained there for the rest of his days. Another experienced deep depression and followed his father into addiction. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself experienced bouts of debilitating gloom and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must frequently have wondered whether he was one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was striking, even charismatic. He was very tall, messy but handsome. Even before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could dominate a gathering. But, having grown up in close quarters with his family members – three brothers to an small space – as an adult he sought out privacy, retreating into quiet when in groups, vanishing for individual journeys.
Existential Fears and Crisis of Faith
In that period, rock experts, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were posing frightening queries. If the story of existence had started eons before the appearance of the human race, then how to hold that the world had been created for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply formed for mankind, who live on a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The modern telescopes and lenses revealed realms infinitely large and creatures minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s belief, given such proof, in a God who had made mankind in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then might the mankind meet the same fate?
Persistent Motifs: Mythical Beast and Friendship
The biographer ties his narrative together with two recurring motifs. The initial he introduces early on – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young student when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the short sonnet presents ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something immense, unspeakable and sad, concealed beyond reach of human understanding, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a master of metre and as the originator of images in which terrible mystery is compressed into a few strikingly suggestive words.
The other motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional beast symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is loving and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, penned a grateful note in verse depicting him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, wrist and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of pleasure excellently suited to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of hedonism – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb absurdity of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the old man with a whiskers in which “two owls and a hen, four larks and a small bird” constructed their homes.
