Uncharted Depths: Examining Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a torn individual. He even composed a poem called The Two Voices, wherein two aspects of himself debated the arguments of self-destruction. Within this illuminating volume, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the more obscure character of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 proved to be pivotal for Alfred. He unveiled the great poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had worked for almost twenty years. Consequently, he grew both famous and wealthy. He entered matrimony, after a 14‑year engagement. Previously, he had been residing in leased properties with his family members, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or living by himself in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren coasts. At that point he acquired a residence where he could receive prominent guests. He was appointed the official poet. His existence as a celebrated individual commenced.
From his teens he was imposing, even charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but attractive
Ancestral Turmoil
His family, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning inclined to emotional swings and melancholy. His paternal figure, a unwilling clergyman, was volatile and regularly intoxicated. Occurred an incident, the particulars of which are unclear, 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 child and remained there for his entire existence. Another suffered from severe melancholy and copied his father into drinking. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of overwhelming sadness and what he called “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is voiced by a madman: he must often have wondered whether he might turn into one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, messy but handsome. Even before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a gathering. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his family members – three brothers to an small space – as an grown man he craved isolation, escaping into silence when in groups, retreating for individual excursions.
Existential Concerns and Crisis of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were introducing disturbing questions. If the story of life on Earth had begun eons before the emergence of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been created for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely formed for mankind, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The modern telescopes and lenses uncovered spaces vast beyond measure and beings tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s faith, given such proof, in a God who had created man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then might the humanity do so too?
Repeating Elements: Sea Monster and Friendship
The biographer binds his account together with two recurring elements. The initial he establishes at the beginning – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line sonnet presents ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, concealed beyond reach of human inquiry, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a master of verse and as the author of symbols in which awful mystery is packed into a few dazzlingly indicative words.
The second theme is the counterpart. Where the imaginary sea monster represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is fond and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in verse depicting him in his flower bed with his tame doves perching all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on arm, palm and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of pleasure excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb nonsense of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, multiple birds and a wren” constructed their dwellings.
