The Boundless Deep: Examining Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a torn soul. He even composed a verse named The Two Voices, in which dual facets of his personality argued the arguments of ending his life. Within this insightful work, the biographer decides to concentrate on the overlooked identity of the writer.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 proved to be pivotal for the poet. He released the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for close to twenty years. As a result, he grew both renowned and prosperous. He entered matrimony, after a 14‑year courtship. Before that, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or living in solitude in a dilapidated house on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren beaches. At that point he acquired a home where he could entertain distinguished callers. He became poet laureate. His life as a celebrated individual started.
From his teens he was commanding, even magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome
Ancestral Struggles
His family, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, indicating susceptible to temperament and sadness. His paternal figure, a reluctant priest, was angry and very often drunk. There was an occurrence, the particulars of which are unclear, that resulted in the family cook being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and lived there for his entire existence. Another experienced profound depression and emulated his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself endured periods of paralysing despair and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is voiced by a madman: he must frequently have pondered whether he could become one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was imposing, almost glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but handsome. Even before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could control a space. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his siblings – multiple siblings to an small space – as an grown man he sought out isolation, retreating into silence when in groups, vanishing for solitary journeys.
Philosophical Fears and Crisis of Faith
In that period, earth scientists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were raising frightening questions. If the timeline of living beings had commenced ages before the arrival of the humanity, then how to believe that the world had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply created for us, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The new optical instruments and lenses uncovered realms immensely huge and beings infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s faith, considering such proof, in a God who had formed humanity in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the human race do so too?
Persistent Themes: Mythical Beast and Companionship
Holmes binds his story together with two recurring themes. The first he presents initially – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line sonnet presents themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, submerged out of reach of investigation, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of verse and as the originator of metaphors in which terrible mystery is compressed into a few brilliantly indicative lines.
The additional element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical sea monster epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is loving and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, composed a grateful note in rhyme depicting him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on arm, palm and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of pleasure perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb foolishness of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, four larks and a tiny creature” constructed their homes.
