Uncharted Depths: Delving into Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a divided individual. He famously wrote a piece named The Two Voices, in which dual aspects of himself contemplated the arguments of ending his life. Through this revealing work, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the lesser known identity of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
The year 1850 became decisive for Alfred. He released the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had worked for close to twenty years. Consequently, he emerged as both renowned and wealthy. He got married, following a long engagement. Before that, he had been residing in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or living in solitude in a dilapidated house on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren shores. At that point he acquired a home where he could host prominent visitors. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His existence as a celebrated individual began.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but handsome
Family Struggles
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting prone to temperament and melancholy. His father, a reluctant clergyman, was volatile and frequently intoxicated. There was an occurrence, the particulars of which are obscure, that resulted in the domestic worker being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a lunatic asylum as a youth and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from severe melancholy and followed his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself suffered from periods of paralysing gloom and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His work Maud is told by a lunatic: he must regularly have pondered whether he might turn into one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was striking, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome. Even before he adopted a dark cloak and sombrero, he could control a space. But, being raised crowded with his siblings – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an adult he desired isolation, withdrawing into quiet when in groups, vanishing for solitary walking tours.
Existential Fears and Upheaval of Faith
During his era, rock experts, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the evolution, were raising appalling inquiries. If the story of existence had begun millions of years before the arrival of the mankind, then how to maintain that the planet had been made for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply formed for us, who inhabit a minor world of a common sun.” The modern viewing devices and lenses exposed areas infinitely large and creatures infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s faith, considering such proof, in a God who had created mankind in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then might the human race do so too?
Recurrent Elements: Sea Monster and Bond
The author weaves his account together with a pair of persistent elements. The primary he presents early on – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the short poem introduces themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something enormous, indescribable and sad, submerged out of reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of rhythm and as the author of metaphors in which dreadful unknown is condensed into a few strikingly suggestive lines.
The second element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical creature represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is affectionate and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, composed a thank-you letter in verse depicting him in his rose garden with his tame doves resting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on arm, palm and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of pleasure perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s great celebration of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb nonsense of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, four larks and a tiny creature” built their nests.
