The Vast Unknown: Exploring Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself existed as a divided spirit. He even composed a poem named The Two Voices, where two facets of his personality contemplated the merits of self-destruction. Within this revealing work, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the overlooked persona of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 became pivotal for Alfred. He published the significant verse series In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for almost twenty years. Therefore, he grew both celebrated and wealthy. He got married, subsequent to a 14‑year courtship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or residing by himself in a ramshackle cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren shores. Then he moved into a house where he could host prominent guests. He became the official poet. His existence as a Great Man commenced.
Even as a youth he was commanding, even glamorous. He was very tall, messy but handsome
Lineage Challenges
The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating inclined to temperament and depression. His parent, a hesitant clergyman, was irate and very often drunk. Transpired an occurrence, the details of which are vague, that caused the domestic worker being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and remained there for the rest of his days. Another endured profound despair and copied his father into addiction. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself endured bouts of overwhelming gloom and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His Maud is told by a madman: he must regularly have pondered whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but handsome. Even before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a room. But, having grown up crowded with his siblings – three brothers to an small space – as an mature individual he craved isolation, escaping into quiet when in company, retreating for lonely walking tours.
Philosophical Concerns and Turmoil of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were raising disturbing queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had commenced eons before the emergence of the humanity, then how to believe that the planet had been formed for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely formed for humanity, who reside on a minor world of a third-rate sun The new viewing devices and microscopes uncovered areas vast beyond measure and organisms infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s religion, in light of such findings, in a divine being who had formed man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the human race meet the same fate?
Persistent Motifs: Kraken and Friendship
The biographer binds his narrative together with dual recurring elements. The first he presents early on – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the brief poem establishes themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something enormous, unspeakable and mournful, submerged out of reach of human inquiry, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the creator of metaphors in which terrible unknown is compressed into a few strikingly evocative lines.
The second motif is the counterpart. Where the mythical sea monster symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, summons up all that is loving and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a thank-you letter in poetry depicting him in his rose garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on arm, palm and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of joy nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent nonsense of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “two owls and a fowl, several songbirds and a small bird” built their homes.
