The Boundless Deep: Exploring Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Alfred Tennyson existed as a conflicted spirit. He produced a verse called The Two Voices, wherein two aspects of the poet contemplated the arguments of ending his life. In this insightful work, the biographer chooses to focus on the more obscure identity of the writer.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 was pivotal for the poet. He published the significant verse series In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for close to a long period. Therefore, he grew both famous and rich. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a long relationship. Previously, he had been living in leased properties with his family members, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or living by himself in a ramshackle cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren coasts. At that point he took a home where he could host prominent visitors. He became the official poet. His life as a celebrated individual started.
Even as a youth he was striking, almost magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive
Lineage Turmoil
His family, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning susceptible to emotional swings and sadness. His parent, a reluctant clergyman, was irate and frequently inebriated. Transpired an event, the details of which are vague, that caused the household servant being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a mental institution as a boy and remained there for the rest of his days. Another endured deep melancholy and followed his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself experienced episodes of debilitating sadness and what he termed “weird seizures”. His Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must frequently have pondered whether he might turn into one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was striking, almost magnetic. He was of great height, messy but good-looking. Even before he began to wear a dark cloak and sombrero, he could dominate a gathering. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his family members – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an grown man he sought out solitude, escaping into silence when in groups, disappearing for solitary walking tours.
Deep Fears and Crisis of Faith
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, astronomers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were raising disturbing questions. If the history of life on Earth had commenced ages before the appearance of the humanity, then how to believe that the planet had been formed for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply made for us, who reside on a minor world of a third-rate sun The recent telescopes and microscopes uncovered spaces vast beyond measure and creatures minutely tiny: how to keep one’s faith, in light of such findings, in a divine being who had made man in his form? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then would the humanity do so too?
Repeating Motifs: Mythical Beast and Companionship
Holmes weaves his narrative together with two recurrent motifs. The initial he establishes initially – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “ancient legends, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief sonnet presents ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and mournful, submerged inaccessible of human inquiry, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of verse and as the creator of metaphors in which dreadful enigma is compressed into a few brilliantly indicative lines.
The second motif is the contrast. Where the fictional creature epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a grateful note in verse depicting him in his flower bed with his pet birds resting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, wrist and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of pleasure nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s significant praise of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant nonsense of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s poem about the old man with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, several songbirds and a tiny creature” made their nests.
