Uncharted Depths: Examining Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a torn soul. He famously wrote a poem called The Two Voices, where dual aspects of himself contemplated the pros and cons of ending his life. Through this insightful work, the biographer decides to concentrate on the overlooked identity of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
During 1850 became crucial for Tennyson. He published the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for almost two decades. Consequently, he became both celebrated and rich. He entered matrimony, after a long engagement. Before that, he had been living in rented homes with his relatives, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or residing in solitude in a dilapidated house on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Now he moved into a residence where he could host distinguished visitors. He assumed the role of the national poet. His existence as a Great Man began.
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive
Lineage Struggles
His family, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning inclined to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a reluctant clergyman, was volatile and very often inebriated. Transpired an occurrence, the details of which are vague, that led to the household servant being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a mental institution as a child and remained there for his entire existence. Another endured profound depression and copied his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself experienced bouts of debilitating gloom and what he called “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is told by a madman: he must often have wondered whether he could become one himself.
The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was striking, even charismatic. He was of great height, messy but handsome. Even before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could command a space. But, being raised in close quarters with his family members – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an adult he craved isolation, escaping into quiet when in groups, retreating for solitary walking tours.
Existential Fears and Crisis of Faith
In that period, geologists, astronomers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were introducing appalling questions. If the history of existence had started millions of years before the emergence of the mankind, then how to believe that the world had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely formed for us, who reside on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The new viewing devices and microscopes revealed areas vast beyond measure and creatures infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s faith, given such findings, in a deity who had formed mankind in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then would the humanity meet the same fate?
Persistent Elements: Mythical Beast and Companionship
The biographer ties his narrative together with two recurring elements. The primary he establishes early on – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young scholar when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line sonnet presents concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something immense, indescribable and sad, hidden out of reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a expert of rhythm and as the originator of symbols in which terrible mystery is compressed into a few dazzlingly indicative lines.
The other theme is the contrast. Where the imaginary creature epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is loving and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, composed a appreciation message in poetry portraying him in his garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on back, wrist and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of joy perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s great celebration of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb nonsense of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the old man with a beard in which “two owls and a hen, several songbirds and a small bird” constructed their nests.