The Boundless Deep: Examining Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself was known as a torn individual. He even composed a poem titled The Two Voices, where contrasting facets of himself argued the pros and cons of ending his life. Through this illuminating volume, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the lesser known identity of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 became pivotal for the poet. He unveiled the monumental verse series In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for nearly a long period. Consequently, he became both famous and wealthy. He wed, after a long relationship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or lodging with male acquaintances in London, or residing in solitude in a ramshackle house on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren shores. At that point he acquired a house where he could host prominent guests. He was appointed the national poet. His existence as a renowned figure started.
Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, disheveled but attractive
Ancestral Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting susceptible to emotional swings and depression. His paternal figure, a reluctant minister, was volatile and very often drunk. There was an event, the details of which are unclear, that caused the household servant being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a youth and lived there for life. Another experienced severe melancholy and followed his father into alcoholism. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself endured bouts of overwhelming gloom and what he called “strange episodes”. His work Maud is told by a insane person: he must regularly have wondered whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was very tall, messy but good-looking. Before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could dominate a room. But, maturing crowded with his family members – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an adult he sought out isolation, withdrawing into quiet when in groups, retreating for solitary journeys.
Deep Concerns and Turmoil of Faith
In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were raising disturbing inquiries. If the history of living beings had started eons before the appearance of the humanity, then how to believe that the world had been formed for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely made for humanity, who reside on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun The new viewing devices and lenses uncovered areas immensely huge and creatures minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s religion, given such proof, in a deity who had made man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then might the human race follow suit?
Repeating Elements: Kraken and Companionship
The biographer binds his story together with dual recurrent themes. The initial he presents early on – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line sonnet presents concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, submerged out of reach of human inquiry, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a master of rhythm and as the originator of metaphors in which awful mystery is packed into a few strikingly suggestive lines.
The additional motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical creature represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, composed a grateful note in poetry depicting him in his garden with his tame doves perching all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on back, hand and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an image of joy nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb foolishness of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren” constructed their dwellings.
