Uncharted Depths: Examining Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself was known as a torn spirit. He produced a poem called The Two Voices, wherein contrasting aspects of the poet argued the arguments of self-destruction. Within this illuminating work, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the more obscure identity of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 was crucial for Alfred. He published the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for almost two decades. As a result, he grew both renowned and rich. He wed, following a extended courtship. Previously, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his family members, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or residing alone in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren shores. Then he acquired a home where he could entertain prominent callers. He became poet laureate. His life as a celebrated individual started.
Even as a youth he was commanding, almost glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but good-looking
Lineage Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating susceptible to emotional swings and melancholy. His paternal figure, a hesitant priest, was irate and very often drunk. There was an event, the facts of which are obscure, that led to the household servant being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a lunatic asylum as a child and remained there for the rest of his days. Another endured deep melancholy and emulated his father into addiction. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself endured bouts of paralysing sadness and what he termed “weird seizures”. His work Maud is voiced by a madman: he must frequently have questioned whether he might turn into one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive. Before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could dominate a room. But, being raised crowded with his siblings – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he craved solitude, retreating into stillness when in social settings, retreating for solitary excursions.
Existential Anxieties and Turmoil of Conviction
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, astronomers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the evolution, were posing appalling queries. If the story of life on Earth had begun millions of years before the emergence of the human race, then how to maintain that the planet had been created for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply created for mankind, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The new optical instruments and lenses revealed realms immensely huge and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s faith, given such proof, in a deity who had created humanity in his form? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then would the human race follow suit?
Persistent Themes: Kraken and Bond
Holmes ties his story together with dual recurring motifs. The first he introduces early on – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Norse mythology, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief poem establishes concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something vast, unspeakable and sad, submerged out of reach of investigation, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the originator of symbols in which terrible mystery is compressed into a few strikingly suggestive phrases.
The second motif is the counterpart. Where the imaginary beast symbolises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, penned a thank-you letter in poetry portraying him in his flower bed with his tame doves perching all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on back, palm and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of delight perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s great celebration of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent absurdity of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “two owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a tiny creature” constructed their nests.
