The Boundless Deep: Delving into Early Tennyson's Restless Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a torn spirit. He produced a verse named The Two Voices, where two aspects of himself contemplated the arguments of ending his life. Within this insightful book, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the more obscure character of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
In the year 1850 proved to be crucial for Tennyson. He released the monumental verse series In Memoriam, over which he had worked for close to a long period. Consequently, he emerged as both renowned and wealthy. He got married, subsequent to a 14‑year courtship. Before that, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his family members, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or residing alone in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. Then he took a home where he could entertain distinguished visitors. He became poet laureate. His existence as a renowned figure started.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome
Family Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning susceptible to temperament and sadness. His paternal figure, a reluctant priest, was angry and regularly intoxicated. There was an event, the particulars of which are vague, that led to the family cook being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a child and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from deep depression and followed his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself experienced bouts of overwhelming sadness and what he called “strange episodes”. His work Maud is told by a lunatic: he must frequently have wondered whether he could become one himself.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was striking, almost charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking. Before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a room. But, maturing crowded with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he desired isolation, retreating into silence when in company, vanishing for solitary excursions.
Philosophical Anxieties and Turmoil of Faith
During his era, earth scientists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were posing disturbing inquiries. If the history of life on Earth had begun eons before the emergence of the humanity, then how to maintain that the earth had been made for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply made for mankind, who reside on a minor world of a common sun.” The new telescopes and lenses revealed spaces infinitely large and beings tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s religion, in light of such evidence, in a deity who had formed mankind in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then could the human race meet the same fate?
Persistent Motifs: Sea Monster and Companionship
Holmes ties his story together with two persistent themes. The first he introduces initially – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the brief poem introduces ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, hidden beyond reach of investigation, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of metre and as the author of images in which dreadful unknown is condensed into a few brilliantly suggestive words.
The second theme is the counterpart. Where the mythical creature symbolises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is affectionate and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in rhyme portraying him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on back, hand and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of delight nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent foolishness of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a tiny creature” constructed their homes.
