Uncharted Depths: Examining Young Tennyson's Restless Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a conflicted soul. He produced a piece titled The Two Voices, wherein contrasting versions of his personality argued the pros and cons of suicide. Through this illuminating work, the biographer chooses to focus on the overlooked character of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century
During 1850 proved to be pivotal for Alfred. He released the significant verse series In Memoriam, on which he had worked for nearly a long period. Therefore, he became both celebrated and rich. He wed, subsequent to a long engagement. Earlier, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or lodging with male acquaintances in London, or staying in solitude in a rundown house on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Then he acquired a home where he could host distinguished visitors. He was appointed the national poet. His life as a celebrated individual started.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but handsome
Ancestral Challenges
His family, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning prone to moods and depression. His father, a hesitant minister, was irate and regularly intoxicated. There was an event, the particulars of which are obscure, that led to the domestic worker being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and remained there for life. Another experienced profound depression and copied his father into addiction. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself experienced episodes of debilitating sadness and what he called “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must frequently have questioned whether he could become one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was commanding, even glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking. Before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could dominate a gathering. But, being raised crowded with his family members – multiple siblings to an small space – as an adult he sought out isolation, retreating into silence when in company, retreating for lonely walking tours.
Deep Anxieties and Upheaval of Conviction
In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the origin of species, were posing disturbing questions. If the history of existence had started ages before the arrival of the human race, then how to believe that the world had been created for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely created for us, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The new optical instruments and lenses exposed realms infinitely large and creatures infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s belief, given such proof, in a God who had made humanity in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the humanity meet the same fate?
Recurrent Themes: Mythical Beast and Bond
The biographer binds his narrative together with two persistent themes. The primary he introduces at the beginning – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young student when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short verse establishes ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and sad, concealed inaccessible of human understanding, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a master of metre and as the author of symbols in which terrible unknown is compressed into a few brilliantly indicative lines.
The second motif is the counterpart. Where the imaginary creature symbolises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is fond and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive verses with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, penned a thank-you letter in rhyme describing him in his rose garden with his tame doves resting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on arm, wrist and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of joy excellently suited to FitzGerald’s great celebration of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant nonsense of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, multiple birds and a wren” made their dwellings.
