The Boundless Deep: Examining Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a conflicted soul. He even composed a piece titled The Two Voices, where two aspects of the poet contemplated the merits of ending his life. In this insightful volume, the biographer elects to spotlight on the overlooked character of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 became crucial for the poet. He unveiled the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for nearly a long period. Consequently, he became both famous and rich. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a 14‑year relationship. Before that, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or living by himself in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren shores. At that point he moved into a residence where he could host notable callers. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His existence as a celebrated individual began.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive
Family Challenges
The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting inclined to temperament and depression. His father, a hesitant clergyman, was volatile and very often intoxicated. Occurred an occurrence, the particulars of which are vague, that caused the domestic worker being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a mental institution as a child and stayed there for life. Another suffered from deep despair and emulated his father into drinking. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself endured episodes of debilitating sadness and what he called “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is told by a insane person: he must regularly have pondered whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but attractive. Prior to he adopted a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a gathering. But, maturing crowded with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an attic room – as an grown man he craved solitude, escaping into stillness when in company, retreating for individual excursions.
Existential Fears and Turmoil of Conviction
During his era, geologists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Darwin about the origin of species, were posing frightening inquiries. If the timeline of living beings had commenced ages before the arrival of the human race, then how to hold that the planet had been formed for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely formed for mankind, who reside on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The modern viewing devices and magnifying tools revealed realms vast beyond measure and creatures minutely tiny: how to keep one’s faith, given such findings, in a God who had formed man in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then would the humanity do so too?
Repeating Elements: Kraken and Companionship
Holmes weaves his story together with two recurrent elements. The primary he presents initially – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief verse introduces ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something enormous, unspeakable and sad, hidden inaccessible of human understanding, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of metre and as the author of symbols in which dreadful mystery is condensed into a few strikingly indicative phrases.
The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional creature represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is affectionate and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, penned a thank-you letter in poetry portraying him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on back, wrist and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of joy nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s great praise of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant foolishness of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, four larks and a small bird” constructed their homes.
