The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a divided individual. He famously wrote a poem titled The Two Voices, in which contrasting versions of himself contemplated the arguments of suicide. Through this illuminating book, the author elects to spotlight on the lesser known identity of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century
During 1850 was decisive for Tennyson. He unveiled the great poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had worked for almost a long period. Therefore, he emerged as both renowned and wealthy. He entered matrimony, after a extended courtship. Earlier, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or living in solitude in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. Now he acquired a house where he could host distinguished visitors. He assumed the role of the national poet. His life as a celebrated individual started.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even charismatic. He was very tall, messy but handsome
Lineage Turmoil
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting susceptible to temperament and sadness. His paternal figure, a unwilling minister, was volatile and very often drunk. There was an occurrence, the facts of which are obscure, that caused the family cook being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a youth and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from deep despair and followed his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of paralysing despair and what he termed “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must regularly have wondered whether he was one himself.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was striking, almost charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking. Before he adopted a dark cloak and sombrero, he could control a gathering. But, maturing in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an small space – as an grown man he desired solitude, escaping into stillness when in groups, retreating for lonely excursions.
Deep Anxieties and Turmoil of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, star gazers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were posing appalling questions. If the timeline of life on Earth had begun millions of years before the arrival of the human race, then how to hold that the planet had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely made for mankind, who live on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The modern viewing devices and microscopes exposed spaces infinitely large and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s belief, in light of such proof, in a deity who had created man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then might the mankind do so too?
Persistent Elements: Kraken and Bond
The author ties his story together with a pair of persistent elements. The first he presents at the beginning – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young scholar when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the short verse establishes concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, submerged out of reach of human understanding, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of rhythm and as the originator of metaphors in which dreadful mystery is packed into a few brilliantly indicative lines.
The second element is the contrast. Where the imaginary creature represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is fond and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, composed a appreciation message in verse portraying him in his garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on arm, palm and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of joy excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s notable praise of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent nonsense of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, several songbirds and a wren” made their homes.
