Uncharted Depths: Delving into Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself was known as a torn soul. He even composed a piece named The Two Voices, wherein two versions of the poet argued the pros and cons of self-destruction. In this insightful volume, the biographer decides to concentrate on the more obscure identity of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 became pivotal for the poet. He unveiled the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had worked for close to two decades. Consequently, he became both renowned and prosperous. He got married, subsequent to a extended courtship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his relatives, or lodging with male acquaintances in London, or residing alone in a rundown dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Now he took a home where he could receive distinguished callers. He was appointed the national poet. His existence as a renowned figure commenced.
Even as a youth he was imposing, even glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome
Ancestral Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning inclined to temperament and sadness. His paternal figure, a reluctant minister, was irate and regularly inebriated. Occurred an event, the particulars of which are vague, that resulted in the household servant being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a child and lived there for life. Another endured profound melancholy and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself experienced periods of paralysing despair and what he called “strange episodes”. His work Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must often have wondered whether he was one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking. Prior to he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could control a room. But, maturing crowded with his siblings – three brothers to an attic room – as an mature individual he sought out privacy, withdrawing into silence when in groups, disappearing for individual journeys.
Deep Fears and Turmoil of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were raising disturbing queries. If the timeline of living beings had commenced millions of years before the arrival of the mankind, then how to maintain that the planet had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply formed for mankind, who live on a minor world of a third-rate sun The modern optical instruments and microscopes exposed realms immensely huge and organisms minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s faith, given such evidence, in a deity who had formed mankind in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become died out, then might the humanity follow suit?
Persistent Themes: Sea Monster and Friendship
The author binds his account together with dual persistent themes. The primary he establishes early on – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young scholar when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the 15-line sonnet establishes ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and mournful, concealed out of reach of investigation, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a master of verse and as the author of metaphors in which awful enigma is compressed into a few brilliantly evocative lines.
The other theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional sea monster epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive verses with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a appreciation message in rhyme depicting him in his rose garden with his pet birds resting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, wrist and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of pleasure perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s great praise of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent foolishness of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “two owls and a hen, multiple birds and a tiny creature” made their homes.
