Uncharted Depths: Exploring Young Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a conflicted individual. He famously wrote a piece titled The Two Voices, in which two facets of his personality argued the arguments of suicide. Through this insightful book, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the more obscure identity of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 proved to be crucial for the poet. He published the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had worked for close to two decades. Therefore, he emerged as both celebrated and prosperous. He wed, after a long relationship. Previously, he had been living in leased properties with his family members, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or staying alone in a ramshackle cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren shores. At that point he took a house where he could host distinguished visitors. He was appointed the official poet. His life as a celebrated individual began.
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking
Lineage Turmoil
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, indicating prone to emotional swings and sadness. His paternal figure, a hesitant priest, was angry and very often inebriated. Occurred an occurrence, the particulars of which are obscure, that led to the household servant being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a mental institution as a youth and lived there for his entire existence. Another suffered from deep depression and followed his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself experienced episodes of paralysing sadness and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His work Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must frequently have pondered whether he might turn into one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking. Even before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could dominate a room. But, maturing crowded with his siblings – multiple siblings to an small space – as an mature individual he craved isolation, withdrawing into stillness when in social settings, disappearing for individual journeys.
Existential Concerns and Turmoil of Belief
In that period, rock experts, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were introducing frightening inquiries. If the history of living beings had started millions of years before the appearance of the human race, then how to maintain that the earth had been made for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was only made for mankind, who reside on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The new optical instruments and microscopes uncovered areas vast beyond measure and organisms infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s belief, given such evidence, in a deity who had formed humanity in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become died out, then might the mankind do so too?
Persistent Motifs: Sea Monster and Bond
Holmes binds his story together with a pair of persistent motifs. The initial he presents initially – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young student when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the short poem introduces concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something enormous, unspeakable and sad, hidden out of reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of verse and as the creator of metaphors in which dreadful mystery is compressed into a few dazzlingly evocative phrases.
The additional element is the counterpart. Where the fictional sea monster epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is fond and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest verses with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a thank-you letter in rhyme depicting him in his flower bed with his pet birds perching all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on back, hand and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of delight perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent nonsense of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the old man with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a hen, several songbirds and a tiny creature” made their homes.
