Uncharted Depths: Examining Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a conflicted spirit. He produced a poem titled The Two Voices, wherein dual facets of himself contemplated the merits of suicide. Within this illuminating work, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the more obscure persona of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: 1850
In the year 1850 became decisive for Alfred. He unveiled the great poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for nearly a long period. Therefore, he emerged as both renowned and rich. He wed, after a long engagement. Before that, he had been living in leased properties with his relatives, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or living by himself in a rundown cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren coasts. At that point he acquired a home where he could host distinguished guests. He assumed the role of the national poet. His life as a celebrated individual commenced.
From his teens he was imposing, almost charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking
Family Struggles
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating susceptible to temperament and depression. His father, a hesitant priest, was irate and frequently drunk. There was an event, the details of which are vague, that resulted in the domestic worker being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a lunatic asylum as a youth and lived there for the rest of his days. Another endured profound despair and copied his father into drinking. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself experienced bouts of debilitating gloom and what he termed “strange episodes”. His Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must often have wondered whether he was one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, disheveled but good-looking. Before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could dominate a room. But, maturing crowded with his family members – multiple siblings to an small space – as an grown man he desired privacy, escaping into quiet when in groups, disappearing for solitary excursions.
Existential Fears and Turmoil of Faith
In that period, earth scientists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were introducing frightening queries. If the history of living beings had started ages before the appearance of the mankind, then how to believe that the planet had been made for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply created for humanity, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The recent viewing devices and lenses exposed realms infinitely large and beings tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s religion, in light of such proof, in a deity who had made mankind in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then would the humanity meet the same fate?
Persistent Elements: Mythical Beast and Bond
The biographer weaves his account together with two recurring motifs. The initial he introduces early on – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief poem introduces themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and mournful, concealed out of reach of investigation, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a master of rhythm and as the author of images in which awful unknown is packed into a few strikingly indicative lines.
The second motif is the counterpart. Where the imaginary beast epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is fond and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive verses with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, penned a thank-you letter in poetry depicting him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, hand and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of delight nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent absurdity of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “two owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a small bird” constructed their nests.
