Uncharted Depths: Delving into Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a conflicted soul. He famously wrote a poem titled The Two Voices, where two facets of the poet argued the merits of self-destruction. Within this illuminating work, the author decides to concentrate on the overlooked persona of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 became pivotal for Tennyson. He released the great verse series In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for close to a long period. As a result, he emerged as both celebrated and wealthy. He got married, subsequent to a extended relationship. Earlier, he had been living in leased properties with his family members, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or staying by himself in a dilapidated cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren coasts. At that point he moved into a house where he could host notable visitors. He assumed the role of the official poet. His career as a Great Man started.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even charismatic. He was of great height, messy but good-looking
Family Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating prone to temperament and depression. His father, a reluctant minister, was angry and very often inebriated. Transpired an event, the details of which are obscure, that resulted in the household servant being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a mental institution as a youth and lived there for life. Another endured profound depression and copied his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself experienced periods of paralysing sadness and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is told by a madman: he must frequently have wondered whether he was one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was striking, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking. Even before he adopted a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a gathering. But, maturing crowded with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an adult he craved privacy, withdrawing into quiet when in company, retreating for solitary walking tours.
Deep Concerns and Crisis of Belief
In that period, geologists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Darwin about the origin of species, were posing frightening queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had begun eons before the emergence of the humanity, then how to hold that the planet had been made for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply made for us, who inhabit a minor world of a ordinary star The recent optical instruments and lenses uncovered realms vast beyond measure and organisms minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s belief, considering such evidence, in a God who had created mankind in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then might the human race meet the same fate?
Repeating Themes: Kraken and Bond
The biographer ties his account together with a pair of recurrent elements. The primary he presents early on – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief poem introduces themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something vast, unutterable and mournful, hidden inaccessible of human inquiry, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the creator of metaphors in which dreadful unknown is compressed into a few dazzlingly indicative lines.
The second motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical sea monster symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is affectionate and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive verses with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, wrote a appreciation message in poetry depicting him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on back, palm and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of delight excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s notable praise of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant nonsense of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a facial hair in which “two owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a tiny creature” made their dwellings.
