Uncharted Depths: Examining Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a conflicted soul. He produced a poem titled The Two Voices, where contrasting facets of the poet contemplated the merits of suicide. In this revealing volume, the biographer chooses to focus on the more obscure character of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century
During 1850 proved to be decisive for the poet. He released the great collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for close to two decades. Consequently, he became both renowned and wealthy. He wed, following a 14‑year relationship. Before that, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or residing alone in a rundown cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Now he moved into a home where he could host notable visitors. He was appointed the national poet. His life as a Great Man began.
From his teens he was striking, even glamorous. He was of great height, messy but good-looking
Lineage Challenges
The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating susceptible to moods and melancholy. His paternal figure, a unwilling clergyman, was angry and regularly drunk. There was an incident, the details of which are obscure, that led to the family cook being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a lunatic asylum as a child and stayed there for life. Another endured profound depression and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself endured episodes of debilitating despair and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must frequently have wondered whether he could become one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was very tall, disheveled but good-looking. Prior to he adopted a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could control a space. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his siblings – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an adult he craved solitude, retreating into stillness when in company, disappearing for lonely journeys.
Deep Fears and Crisis of Belief
In that period, geologists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were posing disturbing questions. If the history of life on Earth had commenced eons before the arrival of the humanity, then how to maintain that the earth had been formed for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply created for mankind, who inhabit a minor world of a common sun.” The recent optical instruments and microscopes revealed realms immensely huge and creatures minutely tiny: how to keep one’s religion, given such proof, in a God who had made humanity in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then could the humanity meet the same fate?
Recurrent Elements: Sea Monster and Companionship
The author ties his story together with a pair of recurring themes. The first he presents at the beginning – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the short verse establishes themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, submerged out of reach of human understanding, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of metre and as the originator of symbols in which terrible enigma is packed into a few dazzlingly indicative phrases.
The other element is the counterpart. Where the mythical beast epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, summons up all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a grateful note in poetry portraying him in his garden with his tame doves resting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on back, palm and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of joy perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s great celebration of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent foolishness of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, multiple birds and a tiny creature” made their dwellings.
