The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Alfred Tennyson existed as a divided individual. He even composed a piece named The Two Voices, where contrasting versions of the poet debated the pros and cons of suicide. Through this insightful work, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the lesser known persona of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 proved to be crucial for Tennyson. He published the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for close to twenty years. Therefore, he grew both famous and rich. He wed, following a extended engagement. Before that, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or residing in solitude in a rundown cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Then he acquired a house where he could receive prominent visitors. He became the official poet. His existence as a celebrated individual began.
Even as a youth he was imposing, even magnetic. He was of great height, messy but handsome
Family Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting prone to temperament and sadness. His paternal figure, a hesitant clergyman, was angry and regularly drunk. Occurred an incident, the details of which are obscure, that led to the family cook being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a youth and stayed there for his entire existence. Another suffered from profound melancholy and emulated his father into addiction. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself suffered from periods of debilitating sadness and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must frequently have wondered whether he might turn into one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, even magnetic. He was very tall, disheveled but handsome. Even before he adopted a dark cloak and sombrero, he could control a room. But, having grown up in close quarters with his siblings – three brothers to an small space – as an adult he sought out solitude, retreating into stillness when in social settings, retreating for individual walking tours.
Existential Concerns and Upheaval of Faith
In that period, earth scientists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were raising frightening inquiries. If the history of existence had commenced eons before the arrival of the mankind, then how to hold that the earth had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply formed for us, who live on a minor world of a ordinary star The new optical instruments and lenses uncovered spaces vast beyond measure and beings tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s belief, given such findings, in a God who had made humanity in his form? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then might the human race follow suit?
Repeating Themes: Sea Monster and Bond
The biographer binds his account together with dual recurrent themes. The first he establishes initially – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the short poem introduces themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something immense, unspeakable and mournful, hidden beyond reach of human understanding, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of metre and as the author of metaphors in which awful unknown is condensed into a few brilliantly evocative phrases.
The second motif is the contrast. Where the imaginary creature symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is fond and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive verses with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a appreciation message in rhyme portraying him in his rose garden with his pet birds resting all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on back, wrist and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of pleasure nicely suited to FitzGerald’s significant praise of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb foolishness of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the old man with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, multiple birds and a tiny creature” built their homes.
