The Boundless Deep: Examining Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a torn individual. He produced a poem called The Two Voices, where two aspects of himself argued the pros and cons of suicide. Within this revealing work, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the more obscure identity of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 was crucial for the poet. He published the great poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for almost a long period. Therefore, he emerged as both famous and wealthy. He got married, subsequent to a long courtship. Earlier, he had been residing in leased properties with his family members, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or staying in solitude in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Now he moved into a house where he could entertain distinguished guests. He became the official poet. His life as a celebrated individual began.
From his teens he was commanding, even glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking
Ancestral Challenges
His family, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, indicating susceptible to moods and sadness. His father, a unwilling priest, was volatile and frequently inebriated. Transpired an occurrence, the facts of which are vague, that resulted in the household servant being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and remained there for his entire existence. Another experienced profound depression and emulated his father into drinking. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself experienced episodes of paralysing sadness and what he termed “weird seizures”. His Maud is narrated by a madman: he must regularly have questioned whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost glamorous. He was very tall, messy but good-looking. Before he adopted a dark cloak and headwear, he could dominate a room. But, having grown up crowded with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an small space – as an mature individual he desired solitude, escaping into silence when in groups, retreating for solitary walking tours.
Deep Fears and Turmoil of Belief
In that period, rock experts, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with Darwin about the origin of species, were introducing frightening questions. If the history of existence had started ages before the emergence of the human race, then how to hold that the earth had been formed for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely created for mankind, who reside on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The recent optical instruments and magnifying tools exposed areas vast beyond measure and beings infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s belief, in light of such findings, in a God who had formed mankind in his form? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then would the human race meet the same fate?
Repeating Themes: Sea Monster and Companionship
The biographer binds his account together with a pair of recurring motifs. The initial he introduces initially – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the short sonnet establishes concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something enormous, indescribable and sad, concealed beyond reach of human inquiry, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a master of verse and as the author of symbols in which awful unknown is packed into a few brilliantly suggestive phrases.
The other motif is the contrast. Where the mythical creature represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, conjures all that is affectionate and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a thank-you letter in poetry portraying him in his garden with his pet birds resting all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on arm, palm and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an image of joy perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb foolishness of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, several songbirds and a small bird” made their dwellings.
