The Boundless Deep: Examining Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a divided spirit. He produced a poem called The Two Voices, where two aspects of himself debated the merits of suicide. Within this illuminating work, the biographer chooses to focus on the more obscure persona of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
The year 1850 became pivotal for the poet. He released the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had worked for close to a long period. Consequently, he became both famous and wealthy. He got married, subsequent to a extended courtship. Before that, he had been residing in rented homes with his family members, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or staying alone in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Then he moved into a home where he could host distinguished visitors. He was appointed the official poet. His existence as a celebrated individual started.
From his teens he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive
Lineage Challenges
His family, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating susceptible to moods and melancholy. His parent, a hesitant clergyman, was volatile and regularly intoxicated. There was an event, the details of which are vague, that led to the domestic worker being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a mental institution as a youth and remained there for life. Another endured profound depression and copied his father into addiction. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself endured bouts of overwhelming gloom and what he called “weird seizures”. His Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must regularly have pondered whether he might turn into one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking. Even before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a room. But, having grown up in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an adult he desired privacy, escaping into quiet when in company, disappearing for solitary walking tours.
Existential Anxieties and Turmoil of Belief
During his era, rock experts, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were raising appalling queries. If the history of living beings had commenced eons before the emergence of the mankind, then how to maintain that the earth had been made for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was only made for humanity, who live on a minor world of a common sun.” The modern viewing devices and lenses revealed realms infinitely large and beings tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s belief, considering such findings, in a God who had made mankind in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then might the mankind meet the same fate?
Repeating Motifs: Mythical Beast and Bond
Holmes weaves his account together with two persistent themes. The initial he establishes initially – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the short verse introduces ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something vast, indescribable and sad, submerged beyond reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a expert of metre and as the originator of symbols in which awful enigma is packed into a few dazzlingly suggestive lines.
The other theme is the counterpart. Where the fictional sea monster epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is loving and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a grateful note in rhyme portraying him in his garden with his pet birds resting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on arm, hand and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of pleasure nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s great praise of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent nonsense of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the old man with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, multiple birds and a wren” constructed their nests.
