The Vast Unknown: Exploring Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself existed as a divided spirit. He famously wrote a poem titled The Two Voices, wherein two versions of himself contemplated the pros and cons of suicide. Within this revealing volume, the author decides to concentrate on the more obscure persona of the writer.
A Defining Year: 1850
The year 1850 became decisive for Tennyson. He unveiled the monumental verse series In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for nearly two decades. Consequently, he became both famous and rich. He entered matrimony, following a extended courtship. Previously, he had been living in leased properties with his family members, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or living alone in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Then he acquired a house where he could host prominent guests. He assumed the role of the national poet. His existence as a renowned figure started.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome
Ancestral Challenges
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning inclined to emotional swings and depression. His paternal figure, a unwilling minister, was irate and frequently drunk. There was an event, the details of which are obscure, that caused the household servant being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a mental institution as a child and stayed there for his entire existence. Another experienced profound melancholy and copied his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself endured episodes of paralysing despair and what he called “weird seizures”. His Maud is narrated by a madman: he must regularly have questioned whether he could become one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson
Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on magnetic. He was very tall, disheveled but good-looking. Even before he began to wear a dark cloak and sombrero, he could control a space. But, having grown up in close quarters with his siblings – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he craved solitude, retreating into quiet when in company, vanishing for lonely walking tours.
Philosophical Fears and Turmoil of Belief
During his era, earth scientists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were raising appalling questions. If the history of living beings had started millions of years before the appearance of the mankind, then how to hold that the world had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely formed for mankind, who live on a minor world of a ordinary star The modern optical instruments and lenses uncovered areas vast beyond measure and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s belief, in light of such proof, in a divine being who had formed mankind in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the human race meet the same fate?
Persistent Motifs: Kraken and Bond
The biographer ties his narrative together with a pair of recurring elements. The initial he establishes at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief sonnet presents ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something immense, unutterable and sad, concealed inaccessible of human understanding, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a master of rhythm and as the creator of symbols in which awful mystery is packed into a few dazzlingly indicative phrases.
The second motif is the counterpart. Where the fictional creature epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive lines with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a thank-you letter in verse depicting him in his rose garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on back, palm and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of joy nicely suited to FitzGerald’s significant praise of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant foolishness of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, four larks and a wren” constructed their dwellings.