The Boundless Deep: Exploring Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a conflicted individual. He produced a verse named The Two Voices, in which dual facets of himself contemplated the pros and cons of self-destruction. In this insightful volume, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the lesser known persona of the writer.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 was crucial for Alfred. He released the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for close to twenty years. Therefore, he grew both famous and rich. He wed, after a long engagement. Earlier, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or staying by himself in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Then he acquired a home where he could entertain notable callers. He became the national poet. His career as a Great Man started.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, even charismatic. He was very tall, messy but good-looking
Family Challenges
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting prone to emotional swings and melancholy. His father, a unwilling minister, was irate and regularly inebriated. Transpired an event, the details of which are vague, that resulted in the domestic worker being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a lunatic asylum as a boy and remained there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from deep despair and followed his father into drinking. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of overwhelming despair and what he termed “weird seizures”. His Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must regularly have questioned whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was imposing, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, messy but good-looking. Prior to he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could dominate a space. But, being raised in close quarters with his family members – several relatives to an small space – as an adult he sought out solitude, withdrawing into stillness when in company, vanishing for individual walking tours.
Philosophical Concerns and Turmoil of Conviction
In that period, earth scientists, star gazers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the origin of species, were posing disturbing inquiries. If the history of existence had commenced eons before the emergence of the mankind, then how to believe that the earth had been formed for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply created for mankind, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The new telescopes and lenses revealed realms infinitely large and organisms infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s faith, given such findings, in a deity who had formed man in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then might the mankind do so too?
Recurrent Themes: Mythical Beast and Friendship
Holmes binds his account together with dual recurring elements. The first he establishes initially – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line poem introduces concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something immense, unutterable and mournful, concealed inaccessible of investigation, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a expert of metre and as the creator of images in which terrible mystery is compressed into a few brilliantly evocative phrases.
The other theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical sea monster symbolises 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 loving and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive verses with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a appreciation message in rhyme portraying him in his garden with his tame doves resting all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on shoulder, palm and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an image of delight excellently suited to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent foolishness of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, four larks and a small bird” constructed their homes.
